Indie Publishing: Making a Book Cover

The old cover is on the left, and the new one is on the right.

So, what do you think? Would you buy the book on the right?

So, in January of 2017, I self-published a book on Amazon Kindle. It was a 123 page novella called A Tale of Two Ladies, the first book of my steampunk fantasy, The Mechanical Bird.

The story is about two women. Alicia Reynard is a country girl who dreams of building a flying carriage to explore the world. Elena Singleton is a noblewoman who loves mathematics and wants to build a mechanical computer. Yet, they have expectations because of their gender and stations in life. Elena is expected to marry and continue the line of succession for her house. Alicia is stuck helping her family's farm.

Then their country goes to war, not unlike The Great War. In this story, the men are drafted to fight for the King and the women now find themselves with an opportunity to change their place in society and that's how the story begins.

I wrote this story for NaNoWriMo in 2016, and alright, if we take a step back further in time, it actually is a story I started writing in 2009. It was a series of short tales featuring Alicia -- Elena didn't exist at all. She rode around the world in her mechanical bird and helped people. This would be a prequel to that idea and vastly different since it's a serialized longer piece of work.

I only got to book 1 and then I moved and became discouraged with the idea. Bad reviews. Lack of time and energy. Other distractions.

Well now a year and a half later it's become important again. I'm using it to try and understand the Kindle self-pub business better and to see if I can't revive this project.

If you read about indie authors, the basic idea is to write a series, because books in a series sell. Your first book is a reader magnet and whale readers want multiple books in a series.

That's great, but how do you get multiple books in a series?

You write super fast and crank it out. There's a couple of reasons for that. Chiefly, Amazon's algorithm has this 30 day cliff where it stops promoting you. If you write a second novel in that time you can capitalize off of your presence on the charts -- if your first book did any good. You still have to lay the ground work for success but everyone's path to success is different.

I have one book floating out there. It's past the expiration date for Amazon's algorithm. But I can buy ads on Amazon and see if I can get anywhere. I started to tweak the book's blurb and more notably I needed to change the cover.

The old cover sucks.

Most people read it as steampunk, which is great, cause that's what it's supposed to be. Some folks saw it as a western which... kinda works but it's not exactly what it is. And actually after doing some more market research, I started to even wonder if I was limited myself with steampunk. So, I'm starting to think of the story as a young adult fantasy. The keywords show that there's more interest there than steampunk as well.

With the cover, I wanted to evoke more of the Victorian era look and feel and that old cover wasn't doing it. The fonts make it look western, but this time I found and bought a Victorian style font.

Another issue with the old cover is that I had the series name ("The Mechanical Bird") really big and the book name small ("A Tale of Two Ladies).

That needed to be flipped.

The idea there is that you're buying this individual book and you should see the title up front. Second to that you'd learn it's apart of a book series.

So that's what I did. Also, I really wanted that dope looking slant that vintage Victorian posters have and I feel like the new cover gives me this.

It's still not ideal.

What might be more perfect is to have something with the characters on the cover -- like models in costume, but since this self-pub enterprise is run on a shoestring budget that's out of the question. It doesn't mean that I couldn't relaunch the books later with even better covers.

So, now what I really need is Book 2 of The Mechanical Bird. I have the manuscript edited. It needs a final read through from me. I need to make a cover using the same Victorian style. So that's next on the docket.

If I don't find anything egregious with this cover, I'll update Book 1 with it tomorrow,.

Making the Cover

If you've read this far and you're curious, this cover was made using Inkscape.

No Adobe products here.

The original fonts on the old cover are free ones I found online. This time, I spent $19 USD on a Victorian style font and put this together last night. I've probably spent 10 hours on it total. Part of that was hunting for a font but this is the font that will represent the entire series. Sure, I could hire someone to do this work, but hey, I'm putting on my artist, design, and typography hats and learning it by doing it.

If you look closely at that Inkscape screen you can see a lot of the other design elements I've made and experimented with.

You might notice a lot of wings as a motif. I did draw that wing and inked it. Inkscape has a great trick where you can turn a pixel drawing into an SVG file without any hassle. If you want, I can write up a tutorial on how to do that.

So, even with all this work, I'm fully aware that this could still fail, since I don't have any traction on Amazon's charts, but this is me trying something and failing my way to success.

If you have questions abut Inkscape or the indie self-pub business, I can try and answer you. I'm still plankton and I'm learning and trying to get there.