Not every picture you see on the Internet is there for your own use. All you may do is admire it. The majority of them are copyrighted.
There are three ways to avoid copyright problems:
1. Use something that is in the public domain.
2. Use a stock site – and our favourite is Pixabay, as the pictures are not only copyright free but also free. And they provide them in the right sizes. You do need to check the license though. And we do pay a regular monthly amount, voluntarily, which is distributed with other monthly amounts between the artists. You could also contribute to that artist if you like.
3. Commission a picture or even the whole cover.
There are three problems with the latter:
1. It’s a much more for us working with an artist or a cover designer. There are technical, artistic and house style consideration to take into account and there is often a lot of discussion about this.
2. We need to sell between 250 and 1000 books to cover the cost of commissioning a picture or cover. Often the author will offer to pay for this or offer some of the costs but this muddies the waters even more for 3. below.
3. Who owns the copyright on pictures / covers such as these? Professional graphic artists tend to license us for the cover up to a certain number of copies and then we have to pay again. There is also limited use in marketing situations. There is no limit at all in the covers we produce ourselves and we even allow the authors unlimited use of the materials.
So, on the whole we’re happier controlling full production of the cover. Sometimes, however, we commission an artist ourselves especially for novels – this particularly applies to The Red Telephone and Walela but we make sure we get full rights to the material afterwards.
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