My partner in crime, Amy Laurens shared this post on her blog yesterday (which was Monday in Australia) and has given me permission to share with you today! This is the whole, messy process of picking cover art.
Yay! Liana has a new book coming out with Inkprint Press before the end of the year!
Why is this a Made-It Monday, I hear you ask? Well, that would be because I did the cover.
This one was a little tricky to cover, because the tone is light and snappy like chick-lit, but there’s a werewolf like paranormal romance. We decided that conveying the tone was more important (chick-lit readers are more likely to cope with the werewolf in this book than paranormal romance readers are to cope with the sweet-romance, nothing-but-a-kiss, lighthearted sort of tone) but because it was such a process, I thought I’d share today the evolution of the cover and the ideas, because why not?!
So, this was the first main iteration, while we were still in the throes of looking for stock. It’s not terrible, there’s potential there, but it wasn’t quite right for the tone, and it’s not terribly werewolf-y, and something about it just wasn’t gelling. So then we switched to cartoon-style covers, a la chick lit.
These are messy and you can see the stock photo watermarks all over them, but this part of the process is just trialling a bunch of stock really quickly to get a sense of size, shape and possible layouts.
These ones are quite bright and bold, with a lot of primary colours. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it also doesn’t necessarily reflect the Inkprint brand accurately. Liana loved the Christmassy palms, though (since the story is set in Miami, so think ‘beach Christmas’ not ‘snow Christmas’), so we set about refining that idea some more, and playing with layouts that had a little more space in them…
This stage is about trying to commit to a layout and some stock art, with the text there as a general indicator rather than a set-in-stone type thing.
I quite liked the green one as a possible layout/stock combo, so tried a couple of different colours:
Liana preferred the one with the black paw print after ‘werewolf’, but didn’t like the ‘shopaholic’ vibe of the stock, so tried out a few variants on that layout:
The blue one had potential, I thought, and a lot of Liana’s books are blue, so that fit as a subset of her brand. So, hoping that this would be The Stock we would end up with, I made another round of tests (knowing that the hammock would need to be darkened, but skipping that because Time Saving etc)…
This one tested okay with our admittedly tiny test audience, with preferences split pretty evenly between the final two. (I also tried them out with red text rather than pink, but Liana preferred the pink and no one else had a specific preference, so pink it remained!)
However, there was some feedback that we should try it without splitting the title in half for legibility (fair) and that if we could at all possibly include a dog on the cover, that would help highlight the paranormal aspect which distinguishes it from ‘regular’ chick lit.
We have a dog. Admittedly, it’s not *super* werewolfy, but it matches the style of the model (which is actually quite hard to find), the pose is dynamic, and it’s looking knowingly at the woman, which is cute.
You can see that the changes aren’t major at this point now – tweaks in sizes and placement of fonts, things like that.
Speaking of which, time to double check that title font…
We’ll probably keep tweaking the font and trying out other options for the title over the next few days, so this isn’t 100% solid yet, but there you go: the main thing I’ve been working on making this week! I hope you enjoyed the sneak peek into the cover creation process <3
What have you made this week? Don’t forget to tag your contribution, or even better, leave a link in the comments!! I love seeing what inspiring things other people have made