Font

Pick a font that fits your story. Do not go for an embellished, script-style font when writing science fiction. Similarly, don’t use an angular, modern font when writing fantasy or historical fiction. When in doubt, choose a plain font over a stylized one. And you should probably stay away from Comic Sans (unless you are writing a story called “I Hate Comic Sans”).

Once you pick your font, stick with it for the entire cover. Consistency is often shorthand for “professional looking”.

Size

A perfect example of well done text.

Since you are working on a cover for an e-book, there is something you need to remember about your text. It has to look good and be legible when shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp, because that is how people will see it when they are browsing through Amazon or Smashwords or wherever. What that means is that your title should be in as big of a font as possible (short of running into the edges).

After that, remember that people will automatically assign importance to the words based on their size. Which means that your name should be in a smaller font than the title. You will notice that the more popular an author, the larger their name is on the cover. That is because they are a brand, and readers are more interested in finding books by them than with what the actual title is. If you fall into this category, you don’t need this guide, just ask your graphic artist to make the book look good.

What this means is that once you figure out how big to make your title, drop the font size down a notch for your name and stuff like “a short story” or “a novel”. If you have blurbs from people, those should be smaller still.

Placement

Fortunately, if you got the size right, you can place things just about anywhere, people will pick up on it (which is how a tag cloud works, when you think about it). In general, people (who speak English at least, other languages have different conventions) will read from left to right and top to bottom, which means that its hard to go wrong with having the title up top (but centering it works well, too).

The more important part is having sufficient whitespace (or blank space for those of you not using a white background) around your text. If you don’t, things will run together and be difficult to read (impossible to read at postage-stamp size). Furthermore, whitespace around your words will make them stand out, so giving them a bit of a buffer will make them seem larger and more important. As a general rule, the importance of something on a page is inversely proportional to the amount of whitespace surrounding it.

Effects

Plain text may seem boring, but there are all sorts of things you can do with it. You can play with the colors (think of the Google logo), the alignment, the orientation, all sorts of things. I’m not going to talk about this much, as once you start paying attention to covers, you start noticing ones that use nothing but text and look amazing (the cover image above is a good example). So experiment and see what you can come up with.

Next time I’ll start to talk about images. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

The world was once a place of plenty and wonders: famine and disease were largely unheard of, cities floated through the sky, everything appeared to be perfect. But it could not last. When the magic called Ve collapsed, society collapsed along with it: millions starved and the floating cities crashed to the ground. In the wreckage the byproducts of Ve use, magical beings called Amekt, went feral. This along with the ensuing wars rendered the mainland uninhabitable.

In the last days of the old empire, as things began to fall apart, a small group split off an island-sized piece of rock and seeded it with a plant that would allow it to float. For nearly 500 years, the island of Ansau has drifted in isolation on the ocean currents. Life is more difficult than it was, but the Island’s inhabitants have learned to use the trickle of Ve and stability has been the rule. But things are about to change again.

Second, I have finally posted my attempt at a Machine of Death story, Supervillain, which was rejected. I like it though, and you might, too. Keep in mind that it is in no way official. Here’s the first bit:

Silvia resented many things. She resented the job that made her feel like the Red Queen, running ever faster only to find herself stationary. She resented that her crippling student loan debt had paid for an education but not prospects of employment. She resented the economic necessity that forced her to share her too-small apartment with a roommate. But she loathed none of those things. Loathing was reserved for Adam. Her roommate.

Even worse, he was oblivious to her feelings towards him, and continued to do aggravating things. Like talking to her.

“Look at this,“ he said, handing her a slip of paper that could have come out of a fortune cookie save for the block lettering that was the hallmark of the Machine. It said SUPERVILLAIN. “What does it mean?“ That was the other hallmark of the Machine, it was annoyingly vague.

“It means that you‘re going to be killed, somehow, by a supervillain,“ she said. “I‘m thinking comic convention.“ After all, there were no super-powered people running around.

Adam didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t say anything else, which was good enough for her. She took one look at the common area, which appeared to have a nasty infestation of a fungus composed entirely of Adam’s things, and headed for her room, which was almost it’s own apartment within an apartment. If not for the bathroom and the exit being on the other side of No-Man’s-Land, she would never have to leave.

[read the rest]

In any case, a post about cover design might still show up this afternoon, time permitting, but if I were a betting man I would place my money on Friday.

What is worrying is that nothing fundamental has changed about our economy. There are no new safeguards for consumers and wealth is still percolating to the top. Still people are starting to talk about recovery. But a recovery based on what? The idea that things will get better without some sort of fundamental change is naive at best. If you want to see what it looks like when you try to force things to get better without actually fixing the problem, I suggest you look towards Greece.

I don’t like it, but the more I pay attention to the news, the more I think that John Robb may be right, perhaps we are turning into a hollow state, after all. If you’r wondering what all of this has to do with writing, this is the sort of thing that is on my mind when I write things like Uprising and Soapbox (which I will start adding to again later in the month).

This is a very simple cover I did a while ago. The only graphic in it is the leaf above the i, and it was public domain.

One of the services that traditional publishing still provides is art. Many writers aren’t graphic artists, or at least not illustrators, and when I saw a post over at Cheapass Fiction, I realized that people might be able to benefit from my experience. First, let us define what we want to achieve with a cover: We want people to buy/download our stories. To make that happen, the cover should be professional looking and eye-catching (in a good way). Ideally it would have artistic merit in its own right and give the potential reader some idea of what the story is about, but both of those things, if poorly executed, will detract from point #1 (being professional looking). So, how do we go about doing this? Here are some basic rules:

1. Read the guidelines. If you are going to publish at Amazon, check out their guidelines. Same goes for Smashwords. Same goes for Apple (apparently they reject anything that has a web address on it). Same goes for anywhere you want to put it that isn’t your own website.
2. Keep it simple. Many people will be viewing your story from a list, which means that they will see a thumbnail. Many will also be viewing it on a smartphone. What this means is that your cover needs to look good postage stamp sized, so keep it down to what is necessary: Title, Author, image, and possibly story type.
3. Use a light or white background. As a general rule, the darker a background, the more difficult it is to make it look professional. This is partially because you need high contrast for the image to look good as a thumbnail, and with a black background that means white or light text.
4. Use a border. The problem with a light background is that it can blend into its surroundings, which is bad. So add border in black or grey.
5. Use as high quality graphics as you can find/afford. If you are a photographer or know one, this can be to your advantage. Same goes for illustrators. If not, go with professional stock graphics from places like iStockphoto.com or dreamstime (dreamstime has a catalog of free royalty-free images that you can use). You can usually get what you need for $20 or less. A tiny, professional icon is almost always better than a large-scale piece of amateur art. I hope that this next bit is unnecessary, but attention to licenses, do not screw other artists by stealing their work.
6. Look at how everyone else is doing it and don’t be afraid to ask them. Find covers that you like, and figure out what makes you like them. Also, if you see an author doing their own covers and you like it, ask them about it, they will probably tell you, this is how I learned about iStockphoto, I asked Tobias Buckell how he could afford to do the covers for his short stories, and he told me.

Keep in mind that these are just guidelines, all but the first can be broken once you know what you are doing. Also keep in mind that I’m not a professional Graphic Designer, and I’ll probably look back at the stuff I’m making now and wince, so if you have anything to add, feel free to drop a line in the comments.

If you look at the stories in the sidebar, all of them with the exception of the Drones cover were created by me, and all of them inexpensively. In a future post, I plan on spending a bit more time on how to actually make them, and will probably post a template or two for you to use.

In the next week, I hope to finish up my revisions of Caldera, as well as doing a second draft of The Forked Path. In addition, I plan on resuming work on Soapbox (and finally getting everything back to its pre-crash state), although probably at a reduced frequency.

In any case, I give you the 2012 Short Story Writing Month forum!

In other news, I hope to make some more progress on restoring this site tomorrow and Wednesday, focusing on redoing the sidebar and fixing the RSS links (I try to run everything through my feedburner feed). In addition, I plan on fixing the Soapbox page so that it once again has the complete story.