Book covers are hard to make. Or rather, good book covers are hard to make. Do you want to know why? It isn’t because I have the artistic skills of a suitcase. Or because I was designing book covers for about eight years before I even learned about the rule of thirds. It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I use ancient software that crashes all the time because I don’t want to relearn how to do anything. I’ll tell you why it’s hard.
Define good.
Go ahead, I’ll give you a minute.
What makes a book cover a good book cover? You might say it’s a cover that makes someone want to read the book. Not necessarily. A book cover can’t appeal to just anyone. It has to appeal to the same people who will enjoy the story on the inside. If you’d laugh or cry at all the parts I want you to laugh or cry but can’t get past the cover, then I have a problem. If the cover makes you read my book and then write a painful review about how the story made you want to gag, that’s not exactly working for me either.
Right now I’m reading Fire & Ice by Mary Connealy. I would never have picked up this book based on the cover. It has a giant face on the cover. I never like people on covers because they never look like the main characters they’re supposed to look like. Sometimes it’s just because I know the people are models. Sometimes it’s because they don’t look like the characters they’re supposed to look like. In this case the main character is described as having curly hair and hazel eyes. The woman on the cover has straight hair and blue eyes. I get a twinge of irritation every time those descriptions pop up to remind me the cover doesn’t match. But if I get around to writing a review for the book, I won’t mention the cover. I only mention it now to point out that I’m willing to bet Mary Connealy also has fans who think the cover is wonderful.
Good means different things to different people, even people who like the same books. Sometimes a variety of opinions is a beautiful thing. And sometimes, when it comes to book covers, it’s kind of annoying.
I’m trying again to define good for one of my own covers. I wrote Meet Cute in 2013. It’s a collection of short stories that have always been intended as free samples. Lately, far fewer people have been downloading the freebies. I know this is partially because the marketplace is swamped with other freebies. I can’t help but wonder if it is also because I was stubborn on the cover.
People told me it wasn’t good before I released it. But I liked it. I’ve had plenty of complaints since. I’m trying to replace it now to see what happens. This is an experiment to see if more people like the new cover. It doesn’t have anything to do with me admitting I was wrong about the old one. I can’t be wrong about an opinion. And neither are the people giving me conflicting opinions on which redesign is better. We’re all right, and that isn’t helping me at all.
Monday, June 19, 2017
Saturday, May 20, 2017
Daydreamer's Block
I’m afraid progress on my next book has been very slow. And when I say slow, I mean
s
l
o
w.
The basic idea first came to me well over a year ago. I was in the middle of the Coffee and Donuts series at the time, and the idea didn’t fit within that series. It mostly didn’t fit because I knew it would need a much longer timeline than the three weeks in each of those books.
I get ideas I don’t have time for all the time so that wasn’t a big deal. I wrote out some notes and tucked them away for after I finished that series. But by the time I’d finished the last Coffee and Donuts book, my kids had been asking me to write something for them for a lot longer. I pulled out my notes for Wisherton instead. I only intended to write the first book for that series. I dove straight into the second one.
Once book 2 was done, I was finally ready to go back to that other idea. I hunted the notes for what I planned to be my next book.
I couldn’t find them.
I spent several days (on and off) flipping through notebooks in what I thought was a very organized system.
The notes did turn up. But I had been thinking about the project while I searched for those notes and what I thought I wrote didn’t quite match up with what I actually wrote. I had to decide where to correct my notes and where to correct my thinking, which felt an awful lot like starting over.
I think it was my resistance to starting over that made the story and characters harder to imagine. Every time I tried to picture a scene, my brain rebelled and started thinking up chores I could do instead. This strikes me as thoroughly backwards. For a lot of people, daydreaming interferes with getting work done. For me, daydreaming is how I get work done. I need to get the book in my head before I can get it on paper. My head just hasn’t been cooperating.
Don’t worry, I don’t give up easily. I will persevere. I will keep trying until I can spend full days absorbed in a fantasy. Then I will finally be making progress.
s
l
o
w.
The basic idea first came to me well over a year ago. I was in the middle of the Coffee and Donuts series at the time, and the idea didn’t fit within that series. It mostly didn’t fit because I knew it would need a much longer timeline than the three weeks in each of those books.
I get ideas I don’t have time for all the time so that wasn’t a big deal. I wrote out some notes and tucked them away for after I finished that series. But by the time I’d finished the last Coffee and Donuts book, my kids had been asking me to write something for them for a lot longer. I pulled out my notes for Wisherton instead. I only intended to write the first book for that series. I dove straight into the second one.
Once book 2 was done, I was finally ready to go back to that other idea. I hunted the notes for what I planned to be my next book.
I couldn’t find them.
I spent several days (on and off) flipping through notebooks in what I thought was a very organized system.
The notes did turn up. But I had been thinking about the project while I searched for those notes and what I thought I wrote didn’t quite match up with what I actually wrote. I had to decide where to correct my notes and where to correct my thinking, which felt an awful lot like starting over.
I think it was my resistance to starting over that made the story and characters harder to imagine. Every time I tried to picture a scene, my brain rebelled and started thinking up chores I could do instead. This strikes me as thoroughly backwards. For a lot of people, daydreaming interferes with getting work done. For me, daydreaming is how I get work done. I need to get the book in my head before I can get it on paper. My head just hasn’t been cooperating.
Don’t worry, I don’t give up easily. I will persevere. I will keep trying until I can spend full days absorbed in a fantasy. Then I will finally be making progress.
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Back to Names
When thinking of what to post this month, I kept looking at last month’s post because… I don’t know. I really don’t know. I didn’t know what to write about and the only thing I knew I wasn’t going to write about was what I already wrote about. So I kept looking at and thinking about how I wrote about names last month because apparently I thought an old topic was going to help me think of a new topic. It was a completely pathetic circle that went something like this:
What should I write about?
I wrote about names last month so that rules out names.
Guess that means I should write about something other than names.
Not names, not names, not names.
What did I write about last time?
Oh, yeah. Names. I should write about something else.
But what should I write about?
Well, last month was names.
I already decided not to write about names so that isn’t helpful.
What should I write about this month?
Probably not the same topic as last time which was, of course, names.
I really need a new topic.
And then something happened that made me reconsider revisiting names. Someone asked me how to pronounce Samtry, a name from my Wisherton books.
I’ve never liked it when an author uses a name I don’t know how to pronounce. Let’s imagine someone is reading a book with a character named Tabeiallqp. How do you pronounce that? Is that a long a or a short a? Are there two vowel sounds in the middle? Where is the accent? Is the q or the p silent because something doesn’t seem right there? Whoever is reading this book is going to pause to consider questions like these every time the name appears. Every single time. Annoying.
Most readers will settle on a pronunciation in their heads at some point in the book, but by the end they’re still at least sort of thinking of Tabeiallqp as “that guy with the weird name.” That undermines some of the effort the author put into the characterization. Maybe Tabeiallqp was tough and sarcastic but a little sensitive when necessary. The reader will remember him as tough and sarcastic but a little sensitive when necessary and always irritating because of the constant tripping over his name. (In case you’re wondering, it’s Ta-BAIL-quip.)
But enough about Tabeiallqp.
I didn’t mean to give anyone a difficult name. Samtry’s name was given to me out loud before I saw it in print so I never considered that it might suggest alternate pronunciations. I posted an excerpt from Beyond Wisherton last month, and since I’m already on reruns it seemed like a good idea to post another excerpt. To clarify any confusion on pronunciation though, I’m offering this excerpt as audio. Here is chapter 1 of the second book, Back to Wisherton.
What should I write about?
I wrote about names last month so that rules out names.
Guess that means I should write about something other than names.
Not names, not names, not names.
What did I write about last time?
Oh, yeah. Names. I should write about something else.
But what should I write about?
Well, last month was names.
I already decided not to write about names so that isn’t helpful.
What should I write about this month?
Probably not the same topic as last time which was, of course, names.
I really need a new topic.
And then something happened that made me reconsider revisiting names. Someone asked me how to pronounce Samtry, a name from my Wisherton books.
I’ve never liked it when an author uses a name I don’t know how to pronounce. Let’s imagine someone is reading a book with a character named Tabeiallqp. How do you pronounce that? Is that a long a or a short a? Are there two vowel sounds in the middle? Where is the accent? Is the q or the p silent because something doesn’t seem right there? Whoever is reading this book is going to pause to consider questions like these every time the name appears. Every single time. Annoying.
Most readers will settle on a pronunciation in their heads at some point in the book, but by the end they’re still at least sort of thinking of Tabeiallqp as “that guy with the weird name.” That undermines some of the effort the author put into the characterization. Maybe Tabeiallqp was tough and sarcastic but a little sensitive when necessary. The reader will remember him as tough and sarcastic but a little sensitive when necessary and always irritating because of the constant tripping over his name. (In case you’re wondering, it’s Ta-BAIL-quip.)
But enough about Tabeiallqp.
I didn’t mean to give anyone a difficult name. Samtry’s name was given to me out loud before I saw it in print so I never considered that it might suggest alternate pronunciations. I posted an excerpt from Beyond Wisherton last month, and since I’m already on reruns it seemed like a good idea to post another excerpt. To clarify any confusion on pronunciation though, I’m offering this excerpt as audio. Here is chapter 1 of the second book, Back to Wisherton.
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