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Naturally the cover needs to give a good indication of what
the book is about without giving anything away that will spoil the reader’s
enjoyment. There is a whole debate the be had there. But in this post I’m talking
more about the shape and colour of the illustration selected.
Often we’re asked to use a photograph or an illustration
that authors themselves provide. And sometimes they just don’t work. Then there
is the colour blue which can be very difficult to get right. It’s almost
impossible to get a computer to show this accurately.
Occasionally a writer will find a picture they would like to
use but we than have to check that the picture is not copyright AND that it is
the right shape and colour.
Sometimes an author will suggest a concept and that is something
we can work with. We use pixabay. Not only
are all of the pictures copyright free but they are also free to download. We
actually pay a voluntary small fee each month and we always acknowledge the
illustrator.
A neat little trick is to put our concept into pixabay’s
research facility. So for example when we put Snowflakes together we put in the search term “snowflakes”. Here a
few that we came up with today.
Technically, this woks well. We would have to reverse the image so that the Christmas tree, star and globe are on the right, representing the front cover. The left, back cover, is plain enough to include a blurb. The title and subtitle would go beneath the tree. However, maybe this is a little too Christmassy for our theme.
In many ways fine but it would be hard to make the title, author and blurb show up.
Okay, snow flakes all right but a little insipid.
Our actual cover:
Note: the original picture had a brown background.
Nativity was difficult. The search brought up too many traditional nativity scenes. Instead we went for quite an abstract landscape and the abstract DNA in the first letter:
