book covers – Polenth's Blog

Work in progress of a chalk pastel squid drawing.

The Same

When I started out self-publishing, there was a lot of pressure to use covers that looked like the ones big publishers would use. What a terrible thing it would be if people noticed the book was self-published. They might think it was different in some way. Different is bad.

I’d often had my short work rejected for being too different, too weird, too unlike what we’ve published before, not the direction we’re going in, and many other ways of saying it’s just plain odd. This raised the question of whether I actually wanted a cover that looked like I was writing something I wasn’t. The stories were different and maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. The cover should surely reflect that.

It turned out that big publishers didn’t disagree. There were covers that stood out from the crowd as being different, because that’s how the book was being marketed. One that stuck with me was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, where the majority of the cover is a solid colour. There’s a small picture of someone’s legs and feet in the top corner. The text is pushed to the edges.

A lot of online critique means well, but without context about the book and the publisher, that cover would be slammed. The elements shouldn’t be at the edges. Make the picture fill the whole space. Look at covers in your genre, because they don’t look like that. Indeed, some versions of the cover are more typically laid out. But it’s the one with the tiny picture that I noticed.

The Different

People talk about professionalism and quality, as though they’re carved in stone and never subjective. This is usually the artistic equivalent of a generic business suit, as though that would be suitable for every job and situation.

The Garden Gang books were written and illustrated by Jayne Fisher. She was a child and you can tell that from the drawings. The pen lines are clearly visible where the characters are coloured in. These books are not bad, low quality or unprofessional. The art and writing is just right for them. They were also published by Ladybird Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Yayoi Kusama dresses in bright polka dots. She’s an artist known for her work with patterns. There’s nothing unprofessional about that.

In a creative industry, there’s a very big range in what is acceptable. If it works, it works. Sometimes there’s no way to know if it will work without trying it.

The Unchoice

In the end, I didn’t really have a choice about doing my own covers. I couldn’t afford anything else. But thinking about these issues helped me break away from trying to make covers that looked like other people’s covers. I made covers that fit my books, with a focus on the styles I was best at doing. The result was people have bought my books based on the covers and I started selling art as well.

The one people most often talk about is Werecockroach, because I drew it in wax crayons. It was a bit of a dig at people who complain about self-published covers drawn in crayon, though it’s also a scene in the book. This has worked when I’ve run adverts, because it really stands out in a line of book covers (crayon covers are not actually the most common sort outside of jokes). It marks the book as being extremely self-published in a way some readers want.

The Twist

That hasn’t been the end of the story though. There’s a plot twist, because the issue of AI generated covers is at the forefront. Suddenly, it’s become an advantage to have a cover that doesn’t have a style that screams AI.

My humble crayon drawing is very difficult for AI to get right, because the AI is not one of Asimov’s robots. It copies things based on probabilities, with no understanding of how a tool might be used to create it. Smooth finishes are preferred over brush marks and sketchy wibbles where someone’s hand shook. Attempts to copy these things never look quite right. More like a digital filter put over the top.

I visited the Tate Modern’s exhibit on Matisse some years back. Viewing his cutouts up close, the pencil lines can be seen, along with the pin marks where the paper was held. It’s something AI is currently unable to accurately copy.

It’ll be interesting to see what this means for self-published covers. In a world where readers will increasingly judge anything that looks like it might be AI, and there’s no guarantee that hired cover artists will be honest, there’s a bigger push for self-published authors to make their own covers. An author might be better off with a cover that’s simply a nice typeface on a plain background.

The Future

For myself, it’s clear that I’m better off producing art by hand as much as possible. It’s going to be an advantage to show the sketchy lines and other marks, to the point of thinking of ways to make them more obvious. Embracing the imperfections that show thought behind them rather than being the result of mathematical mistakes.

There’s a sadness to this though. I like doing my own covers. It’ll be fun to see if more authors go that route. But I wish it wasn’t something that was forced and going to make it harder for artists who do cover art commissions.

Maybe the future will end up more balanced, but until then, it’s time to break out the pencils.

Usually covers have a limited colour scheme, using shades of one colour, two colours that work together (either because they’re close together or dramatic opposites), or a bold tri-colour scheme using the primary colours. This is mainly because it’s very easy to make rainbows look like a unicorn vomited on the book.

Which is all very well, but the theme for my collection is rainbows, so an all-green cover wouldn’t exactly fit (no matter how lovely). I want to avoid any of the unicorn-vomit pitfalls, but I also want a rainbow. So before starting my own cover, I looked at other artwork using rainbows. These are my thoughts about using that colour scheme effectively.

Rainbow Rules

My first step was a visit to Google images. I searched for terms like “rainbows” and “rainbow lights”. A few observations on the pictures that came up are as follows:

Some images used the vomit method on purpose, such as psychedelic artwork and digitally edited photos of rainbows. These are intended to overload the viewer. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for a book cover, it’d detract from the details you want the viewer to see (the title and the author).
For non-psychedelic works, the most effective had de-saturated backgrounds, such as black, grey or a greyish shade of a colour. This made the rainbow stand out and also solved the visual overload problem. White backgrounds were also used for a brighter feel, but the rainbow stood out less against them.
Some focused mainly on one or two colours, with only small amounts of the rest. This gave the feel of the rainbow, without too much of a colour explosion.
The central colour would often appear to dominate at first glance, even if it was in the same quantity (or less) than the rest.
For contrasting areas, some used rainbow opposites. What I mean by this is they’d pair the opposite ends of the rainbow – red and violet. Usually in art, you’d use the opposite on the colour wheel* for this sort of contrast (which would be red opposite green, and violet (purple) opposite yellow). Red and purple wouldn’t be considered to have this sort of contrast, as they’re next to each other on the wheel. However, in a rainbow, the viewer has the expectation that red and purple are opposites, so odd though it is, it works (as long as the picture sufficient screams “rainbow”).
Realistic rainbows had more subdued colours for the rainbow itself, because in the real world, rainbows aren’t generally that bright against the sky. Sometimes it’s good to remember that you don’t have to set saturation to maximum when editing a rainbow picture.
Rainbow lights often had darker shades of the colour at the edges, with highlights in a bright/light shade. Most of these in the image search were photographs of lights, but the principle would work for a painted image too.

Cover Examples

After looking at rainbow images in general, I found book covers with rainbow colour schemes, and analysed which techniques they used (and how well).

Meant to Be – Lauren Morrill

The cover takes an inspiration from natural rainbows, both in having the rainbow in rays like a sun, and having a scene in the foreground. There are colours in the scene, but they’re somewhat muted (note the red dress is not that bright, and has been mostly shadowed out… the grass is somewhat de-saturated). It’s focused on reds and yellows, which goes with the feel-good contemporary novel blurb. It’s also used some rainbow opposites to show the city against the sky.

It does a decent job of implying a groovy psychedelic theme, without going into eye-bleeding territory. The thing I least like is the font choice, but that’s not a colour issue. It’s certainly readable.

The End of the Rainbow – V.C. Andrews

Not only did a unicorn have an accident here, but the magic turned it into a rainbow-vomit whirlwind, which ate the protagonist! Also, the title is in a similarly bright colour so there’s no real contrast. Add in the blurb, which talks about devastating tragedies, secrets and hardship, and someone had too many skittles.

In terms of colour balance, red was shifted to pink, and the yellow/green part is smaller than the rest (possibly in an attempt to make the yellow title text stand out a little more). This wasn’t a successful cover, and it doesn’t surprise me they changed it for the newer version (the new cover barely has any rainbow on, so I won’t be looking at it).

Arclight – Josin L. McQuein

The black background makes the light beams stand out, with white to outline the face without drawing away from the rainbows. A focus on purples and blues is common for speculative fiction, and has been used to good effect here.

Rainbow opposites were used for the title, making it stand out, but also fit with the rainbow theme. It uses the same patterning as the lights, linking the title to the picture.

Crewel – Gennifer Albin

Another speculative book with a different approach. One trick here is the extremes have been minimised. There’s only a hint of violet, indigo and blue. Red is softened to pink for most of it. Saturation has also been used – most of the background colour is less saturated (more subtle than using a grey background, but it’s still there). The swirls are the most saturated parts, and draw the eye (the focal point of those being near the centre, close to the title).

I liked the choice of the pink swirls and red lips as the central colours. It’s playing with cover colour stereotypes, as such colours are usually put on chicklit books. But it’s using them in different ways, with an overall composition that’s more dreamlike and suggests a speculative book. This goes with the blurb about becoming a beautiful and deadly spinster.

Much like Arclight, the title interacts with the picture. It’s dark, so it stands out, but has reddish sections where it crosses the picture.

My Plans

My original idea was a rainbow squid in a black ocean. Arclight was very close to my colour scheme ideas, so I’ve seen it can work.

The debatable point is how bright to make the squid. It could be lit up, as though it’s self-illuminated. It could also be fairly dark, as though a light is being shone onto it. Or a mix of both, with small points of light. As the squid body will take up a fair bit of the cover, I’m leaning towards a darker approach, with some points of light.

Colour-wise, purple/blue is often associated with speculative work, so would be a sensible dominate colour scheme. I liked Crewel‘s play on the cover colour stereotypes, but it’s more of a risk for self-published work. Making the genre easier to identify increases the chances of a reader looking at the book.

I preferred the covers where the title and the picture went together. Meant to Be worked as far as the picture was concerned, but the text seemed separate, as though it was an afterthought. But this decision can come a little later, as I’ll be adding the title digitally. The next step will be drawing the squid, which is a story for another post.

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* See the top of the post for a picture of a basic colour wheel.

On Self-Published Book Covers