Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I’ve said in the past, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. Then I realized there was no way to write this in three parts without making everybody crazy.

We are now at the final cycle of decisionmaking, when The Bewbies™ perked up.

So I decided to weave all three storylines back together as one big honkin’ epic. One problem: Still couldn’t figure out what to call it. I tried the following: The Miracle of Forgiveness, which is related to the church, then Variations on a Theme of Hamlet: The Rest is Silence, The Play’s the Thing, and then I got tired to trying to think of something thematically clever that encompassed each individual story arc within the greater arc.

The Proviso happened cuz I was just plain ol’ tuckered out. You get that way sometimes.

More importantly, the eponymous proviso directly impacts every choice Giselle, Sebastian, and Knox make—and has for years. By extension, the minute Bryce, Eilis, and Justice show up, the proviso sucks them in, too, and changes their lives completely.

Clever? No. Apropos? Yes.

Anyway, my cover ideas were flying fast and furious and I was changing them as fast as I thought them up. During this time, also, I was also settling a whole bunch of other details about websites, press names, printing vendors, and such, which is why there is such a disjointed look to the finer details of the covers, why some earlier covers have The Proviso on the cover and why later versions didn’t. These covers evolved in the course of about a month until I found The Bewbies™:

Hamletesque, you know, skull, overlays of blood and the to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy. The, um, title.

More Hamletesque, except the flames are particular to Bryce (and a little to Giselle), but the book’s not about Bryce; it’s about Knox. (Although some people disagree with me on that!) It had to go. Also, way too over-the-top melodramatic, even for me! (That’s saying something.)

Back to a church theme title overlaid on Union Station, where the last scene in the book takes place, fronting the KC skyline from that angle. But again, the phrase “miracle of forgiveness” is a Bryce theme, although I could stretch it and say it applies to everybody. [Insert rimshot here.]

And we’re back to Lilith, but again, it’s too specific to be able to stretch over the whole story, instead of the one couple it really applies to. Plus? This just sucks in about 156 different ways.

The J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain, which I was DESPERATE to use in some way, plus a blood-spatter overlay. Yeah, this one didn’t even get to the stage of making a JPG out of it. Until now. To show you. Concept okay. Execution, well, not.

Oh, yeah, now we’re getting somewhere. I played with this for the longest time, showed it to Dude, who said, “It’s nice.” I said, “Okay, what’s wrong with it?” “Well, I wouldn’t pick it up in the bookstore.”

So I sighed and went back to the Photoshop. No, actually, I went to iStockPhoto and resigned myself to spending DAYS and DAYS looking for something that encompassed everything I wanted to say.

Two days into iStockPhoto, right? I finally run across The Bewbies™ when it had something like 10 downloads. It was perfect on so many thematic levels, and I knew it immediately. My first thought was not, “Does that say what I want?” It was, “Do I have the balls to put that on my cover?”

Yeah. I sure did.

Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 3.

As discussed, music really influenced me in the writing and designing of this book, both philosophically and thematically. The heroine in the third couple’s book, Justice, loves Rush (“Neil Peart writes my hymns and Rush is my choir.”)and her favorite song is “Freewill.” Since free will is one of the major themes in this couple’s relationship, I titled the book thusly. And Justice is very well aware how the song “New World Man” fits Knox. The clock, you will notice, is almost at midnight, which is also significant, but I’m not going to tell you how.

And Justice for All… was the original title to the Knox and Justice story that I began in 1995. I liked the duality of the theme and Justice’s name being encompassed in the title, but when I got to working on it again in the fall of 2007, I was uneasy with how trite it seemed, which was probably unnecessary insecurity on my part. But then I changed it back, leaving off the “and.” Trite or not, it still fit the story.

The courthouse image is that of Platte County, Missouri. It’s the real county on which I based Chouteau County. Chouteau County has a bad reputation for corruption, and its prosecutor, Knox, blatantly fulfills and spreads that reputation. This is the only made-up place in the whole series. I don’t know the Platte County prosecutor, but I’m sure he’s a nice guy and I’d really hate to be dragged all the way up there to account for myself for casting aspersions on him and his county.  And you know, it’s a really pretty courthouse and deserves to be on a book cover.

[Added November 6, 2009: The Platte County prosecutor's name is Eric. Eric Zahnd, actually. I had no idea when I was writing The Proviso and Stay. And...like Eric Cipriani, he leans libertarian. Freaky!]

The third cover seemed to cover all my bases thematically. Or at least, that’s what I was trying to do. Since Justice is a girl and the Goddess Justice is always depicted as a female, it fits that way, too. However, like the other 3 covers, this represented only a small part of structure of book 3, much less the structure of the series. The art is by Edwin Abbey for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvanian capitol building.

What’s different about book 3 is that its theme is not overtly sexual. The relationship of couple number 1 is based on sex and the “sinfulness” of sex; couple number 1 communicates through sex. The relationship of couple number 2, while not based on sex, is more sensual than sexual and has no “sin” component. The relationship of couple number 3 includes sex, but their issues are those of the mind: agency, trust, philosophy, and interdependence.

So I had a real problem in that the other 2 book covers were similar thematically and this book cover just…wasn’t. And it wasn’t ever going to be. When I put all 3 of these together, they were jarring, and I wasn’t fully satisfied with cover #3. I probably would have changed it 2 or 3 more times if I hadn’t finally decided to braid all 3 stories together. But I did, and that’s where my experimentation with the individual covers stopped.

Next week, the evolution of The Bewbies™.

Thank you for your continuing indulgence on the travails of designing a cover if you’re not a designer of covers. As I said last week, it took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is the story of book 2.

Zoe commented that “Canned Heat” (the original title of book 1) is a favorite song of hers. Well, it’s a favorite of mine, too, and that’s how I came to name it that. It fit the couple. So in keeping with the song names theme, I originally named book 2 (couple #2—so Dating Game) “Dulcissime,” which is an aria from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Trust me, it fit. This cover, however, did not, so…you can see I abandoned that right quick. I remember doing that the same day I did the yellow one (the mostest ickiest one in my previous post).

Well, I hauled out a picture a friend of mine took, which I bought the licensing rights to a gazillion eons ago when I wanted to use it for a different project. (Ignore the purple blotches on the small one and pretend it’s got “Dulcissime” on the front, ’k?) Oh, that was a pretty cover. Showed it to Dude (who was in the midst of reading that particular couple) and he said, “Too girly.” I said, “Yeah, but isn’t it pretty?” He said, “Yeah. That’s my point.” Okay, got it.

Finally, I decided to ditch the “Dulcissime” (because I’m the only one in the world who’d understand it and once Dude said, “How do you pronounce it?” I knew it wouldn’t work) and went for the ORIGINAL original title of that novel’s concept (which had been a stand-alone bouncing around in my brain for years): Morning in Bed. Now, those of you who’ve read The Proviso will know what this refers to; for those of you who haven’t, I’ll not spoil you. Anyway, see above graphic and explanation.

Then I decided to go with a Kansas City theme. Naturally! I showed it to Dude, who said, “Mmmm, yeah, I like it” in a rather unenthusiastic tone of voice. I said, “Okay, what’s the problem?” He said, “It doesn’t stand out. I wouldn’t notice that in a bookstore.”

But this would! And it fits unbelievably well with the story. Problem: It was done in 2002 and is therefore under copyright and, while I was willing to pay whatever I had to pay to get that perfect man on my now-perfect cover with the now-perfect title, I couldn’t find the artist. Anywhere. I called freaking Canada. Twice. You should see my phone bill. Okay, so artist has disappeared off the face of the earth. I wept.

Then it didn’t matter. No matter how much I wanted that art, I couldn’t use it anyway once I decided to reassemble my story under one cover. Like Lilith, this image represented only one of the major characters and I needed something more inclusive. I’m still weeping.

Next week, the covers for couple #3.

If you’ll all indulge me, I though it’d be fun to do a little series on the evolution of a cover by a non-cover artist/designer. It took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is where the cover journey begins.

Each couple has its own challenges within the context of the larger story arc and I wanted to capture each within the cover and title. So I started with something fairly simple:

Make no mistake. I really liked the flames, but over time it just wasn’t doing the trick for me, plus, you know, I’m really proud of Kansas City and wanted to feature it, particularly where the pivotal scene between the couple occurs, the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art. This was my next attempt, inarguably worse than the first.

Then the title started getting on my nerves. I came up with Righteous & Pure, but I still wanted to keep that KC connection. This was little better than the yellow one. It still wasn’t pushing my buttons.

I needed something dark. Something sinful. I found The Sin by Franz von Stuck and thought I’d hit pay dirt, but no, not really. It was too dark and I wanted something more tempting and less Nosferatu. And notice lack of KC. That would simply not do.

Inexplicably, I zigged to a straight KC cover for a little bit with the Nelson-Atkins gallery, but the photo resolution was AWFUL. No go.

Back to temptation. I remembered Lilith by the Honorable John Collier and knew I had it. Then a beta reader of that couple’s romance suggested a small change to the title, Righteous & imPure. It didn’t flow as well as righteous and pure, but it did capture the essence better. Note I squeezed the Nelson in there, too! I held onto that one for a long time, even using it as the original The Proviso cover once I’d reassembled the 3 romances under the same cover.

Next Friday, the cover process for couple #2.

I think I’m supposed to be. I’m told I should be. My neck twitches just slightly when I know I ought to be. But I don’t think I am. Am I?

Bodice ripper.

I just can’t muster up the outrage necessary to protest the term. I mean, there are seriously a bunch more important things to do in life and better battles to fight and more important wars to wage.

A friend of mine refers to The Proviso as a “Mormon bodice ripper.” To my recollection, no bodices were harmed in the making of this book, but a pair of shorts was. So…shorts ripper? Cause, that’s where the goods are, folks, and Some People’s Hero really needed to get to Some People’s Heroine’s goods. Right then.

Okay. Anyway.

No, sorry. Can’t be outraged today. Try me tomorrow.

LDS Fiction has very kindly listed my book amongst the LDS fiction released in the last little while. You have to request this, along with sending its information and the cover (because the poor blog owner can’t be expected to keep track of all the LDS authors and fiction out there). If I recall correctly, I didn’t send a pic of the cover with it because, well, it has bewbies on it. It’s entirely apropos to the story thematically (on about three different levels), but unless you read the book, you aren’t going to get that. On the other hand, I know the audience there and while I didn’t think it would appreciate the cover, obviously the blog owner did what she thought consistent with her blog.

So I’ve garnered a one-star review. Oh, wait, did I say REVIEW? I meant to say, a one-star disapproval rating, based on the cover.

That’s an awful cover. I don’t think I would pick up based on the cover. I couldn’t have it in my home.

To be fair, it does say “rate this book,” not REVIEW this book, but in my world, you kinda have to read a book to rate it, so I think I can be cut some slack for assuming that a rating = review.

This kinda reminds me of the “reviews” Eugene’s book got wherein some folks flew up into the rafters over the fact that there was a bishop’s wife and a vampire together. (Or, better, when the back blurb SAID there was a bishop’s wife and a vampire together, and the reviewers didn’t get it might not be something you’d buy from Deseret Book until they got to the sex scenes.)

I can so appreciate that someone wouldn’t want the print version in the house, so the Lord has provided you with a SOLUTION!

EBOOKS!

Give thanks and be glad.

I like the longer single-title contemporary romance (no suspense, thanks, and the category lengths are just way too short) and lately, the ones I really like have been coming out of the smaller e-presses. They’re not as well edited as I’d like, but they’re fun reads whose story lines seem to stick with me quite a while.

The Truth About Roxy was a light, fun read that still managed to make me laugh and cry. I’ve read another of this author’s non-suspense novels (Letting Luce) and it was just as light and fun. Even *I*, lover of all alpha heroes monied, adore that Jenny’s characters are normal people like me, with normal-people jobs and normal-people problems.

Here’s the blurb:

Roxy Palmer is a walking, breathing cliché. And darned tired of it. Working as the assistant librarian in her small, Southern home town, Roxy also anonymously pens the local love column, ASK PAULA ROCKWELL–Thorton, Georgia’s answer to Dear Abby. But when the door leading to Roxy’s lifetime dream is slammed in her face by one of the good ol’ boys, Roxy brings out the big guns–and turns the genteel town upside down with her racier, feminist, home-wrecking new format. Paula Rockwell is making Sheriff Noah Kennedy’s life crazy. He’s got angry husbands lined around the block, demanding the cancellation of the column, fights breaking out and women catching their boyfriends’ trucks on fire. If he ever gets his hands on that woman… But he’s got his hands FULL of Roxy at the moment, and if he ever discovers the truth about Roxy, all hell will break loose.

Beefs first:

I thought Noah’s extreme reaction to Roxy’s coming-out (as it were) was too much, because he’d known her all his life and he should’ve understood her better.

And oh, that cover, bless their hearts. [Insert longsuffering sigh here.]

Good stuff:

Again, fun, light romp. The characters were engaging and I believed in the nutjobs and the goofy backwater Southern town because they were drawn so vividly.

I had a really good time with this book, and that’s all I care about.

To me, Harry Potter’s fabulous because it’s a whole experience. The cover art and the story work together. It’s got color, movement, focus, texture. You’re sitting there in your reading chair on a cold day (possibly snowing), drinking hot chocolate, bundled up with this heavy hardback book in your hands.

Your head’s in the story. Your eyes are seeing the specialized fonts in the header and the brilliant colors of the edge of the binding. Every once in a while, your eyes get a treat in the form of a graphic buried in the text denoting handwritten notes that give you a sense of intimacy with the events that you don’t get with typesetting. Your arms feel the weight of good storytelling. Your fingertips brush the dust jacket and feel the texture of the thick mottled matte paper, they pinch heavy paper between them and turn the pages.

I have a leatherbound edition of Alice in Wonderland. It, too, is an experience, with a little bit of the feel of age. Deckle edges are the best.

I can tell you all the usual reasons I decided to publish independently, and give you another half dozen reasons why Dude enthusiastically encouraged me to do so (the biggest being that he has faith in my work). But after my little temper tantrum, it occurred to me that there was one other reason I really hadn’t thought about much:

The whole book is the art. I had a vision for my book, the series. Even when I was sending out queries galore, I had a vision and I’ll tell you, I was vaguely depressed to think that even if I got The Call, someone else was going to take my vision and put his own spin on it–and he may or may not give a fat rat’s ass what I want or what I see. That’s not to say a graphic artist wouldn’t have done better than I could have and surpassed my vision by light years. It’s simply that I would have no control over it, a little input that might or might not be taken into account, and perhaps no veto power, especially if he was up against a deadline. This is not a client-vendor relationship between the author and the artist.

Interior design is a relative static: You design so as to make the reader unaware of your design. You don’t give him a headache, you don’t wear his eyeballs out. In short, as Zoe put it, you don’t piss him off.

I can give no advice with regard to other indies and how they handle cover design. All I’m saying is that I’m a very visual person and for me, the story is not the art.

It’s the book.

I’ve read a few self-pubbed books lately. None of them were egregiously horrible in the design department and a couple of them were even fairly decent. And frankly, after I converted them to digital and put them on my ebook reader, it wasn’t an issue at all. But let me take the opportunity today to piss off everybody right up front and then we’ll get to the good stuff.

1. If I hear one more word out of self-pub haters that someone self-pubs because she sucks as a writer– Oh, wait. I hear that all the time and move along on my own business. Nebber mind. You go ahead and keep doing what you’re doing, Mr./Ms. Author, because obviously it’s working for you. (Note: I saw the writing on the wall for me when an editor said, “We love it and it’s well written, but we don’t know where to put it.”)

2. If I hear one more word out of proudly proclaimed self-publishers that no one can typeset anything in MS Word and make it look right, I’ll scream. Yeah, I have seen your books and yes, like you, I can tell who did and didn’t use Word for typesetting. Yes, you proud InDesign/PageMaker users, I can tell that you (or the interior design person you hired) used InDesign/PageMaker. How can I tell? Because you (or the person you hired) suck at InDesign/PageMaker. I cut my teeth on PageMaker in J-school, so I know what it can and can’t do and how well you have to know it to do it right. GIGO.

Design, people. Design is the first reason independent publishing gets no respect. If a reader can’t get past the design, doesn’t matter how good the writing is or isn’t.

I’m not going to worry about discussing cover art today, because, well, I can’t speak. I winged that and after about a year and sixteen different covers, I had enough skills to put this together:

CLICK TO ENLARGE

So let’s talk about interiors, shall we? In this I have a wee bit of knowledge, but mostly it comes from J-school.

In my opinion, there are a few basics that should be fairly commonsensical but I’ve seen violated as of late:

1. Don’t use Times New Roman 12 pt single spaced. Please. Pleasepleaseplease. Pwettypweeze with sugar on top. (And as a personal favor to me, don’t use Garamond or Palatino Linotype, either. Ask Lulu to please add some more fonts to their repertoire you don’t have to embed OR learn how to embed your fonts, but then you wouldn’t need Lulu.) If you choose to use a sans-serif font, pick one that’s easy on the eyeballs like Calibri or Candara.

2. Justify your margins.

3. Don’t use 1/2-inch paragraph indent. Use something a lot smaller.

4. White space!!! You can get away with using a smaller font size if you make sure your line spacing is adequate.

5. Don’t put your headers on the chapter page break.

In my case, I had a 283,000-word book. I wasn’t going to be able to mess with font sizes much and still fit it all in one spine, which meant I had to do a couple of things I wasn’t happy about, but won’t do on books any shorter. One thing was having to make the font 11 pt. Because in Adobe Jenson, that’s really really really small; on the other hand, the line spacing is 14 pt, which, according to some typography books I’ve read, is a good ratio and I must say my eyeballs agree. The other thing was:

6. Start all chapters on the odd page, not the even. This isn’t a “rule” so much as simple polish. I couldn’t do it because of my page count. On the other hand, I haven’t read a book that stuck to this “rule” in so long I’m not even sure why I care.

Okay, so here’s an example from The Proviso:

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Let’s break it down.

1) No header on chapter page, and no page number, either.

2) Right margin justified.

3) 0.5 inch on the outside margin, but wider margin on top and bottom (not much, admittedly, but enough).

4) 0.2 inch paragraph indent.

5) Drop cap and first line small caps. It’s nice. It means you notice details. Neither of these is necessary, but it polishes without going overboard.

6) Nice line spacing = plenty of white space, or at least, as much line space as I could afford, given the length of the book and Lightning Source’s printing limitations.

So what’s my point?

If you are going to try to do these things yourself, learn what makes human eyeballs happy. Read the books. The one I lived and breathed by was this one:

Practice. Experiment. Study the way other books are designed (especially the high-end ones). Notice details. Take notes. Don’t be afraid to throw out your pet specs (the same way you shouldn’t be afraid to throw out your words that don’t work).

Independent publishing is a business just like any other business that sells goods to merchants, which makes it difficult enough for us in an industry that doesn’t do business that way and has a vested interest in keeping the status quo. But you know what? If the last week of handselling has taught me anything, it’s that the readers don’t care who published your book–unless it looks like an unprofessional job.

If they take one look at the book and ask to see it, read the back copy, then flip open the pages to read a little bit, and then whip out their checkbook (especially for a book this expensive), then you’ve done something right. If they aren’t intrigued enough to make it to the back copy, and then the first couple of pages, all the good writing in the world isn’t going to help you. They won’t know why they don’t like looking at it and they’ll care even less, but they will know they just don’t want to look at it.

Bottom line: Once you’re finished with the story inside, forget about it and concentrate on the visuals. The book is the art. It all works together in a symbiotic fashion. Don’t believe me? Ask all those authors whose publishers killed their sales straight out of the gate with a bad cover and bad back copy.

“We don’t know where to put it.”

I do. Right in the readers’ hands.

Just because they’re so dang purty.