Tip of the Day - Fonts for Book Covers

All you DIY indies out there who are either brave or foolish enough to design your own covers, one of my favorite blogs, The Book Designer, has a nice post on good fonts for book covers.

You've all seen crappy covers that look like they were slapped together in Microsoft Paint. Cheap graphics, boring design, and cheesy fonts. You're doing yourself no favors if you skimp on cover design. But what if you can't afford a professional designer? Well, that's still no excuse for doing a crummy job.

There are three elements to a good cover: the concept design, the graphics, and the font. Leaving aside concept and art today, let's talk about fonts for a moment. The first mistake DIYers make is not doing research. When you set out to design your cover, get yourself to Amazon and starting searching for books. Look for books in your genre, look for books by your favorite authors. What do their covers look like? What strikes your fancy, what turns you off?

One of the most important things for ebook covers is finding a font that is easily readable in a small view. Then you need a font that expresses your story/genre/theme. Your cozy mystery is not going to require the same type of font that your splatterpunk horror novel will. Then you need to find a font that fits in with your design and art. You want a thematically pleasing cover that expresses what your book is like and tells the reader what to expect.

After doing some research, you should have some ideas of the look of the font you want for your book. It's probably not going to be font you've already got installed. Trust me, the common fonts on your computer are not necessarily optimal for typesetting and design. So how DO you find a font?

Say you came across a book on Amazon with a great font, how do you identify it? Unless you're a physic font reader or a typesetting savant, you'll have to do some sleuthing. One great way is using the WhatTheFont tool. You just upload the image and it will tell you what font you're looking at. This sometimes takes some jiggering, but once you're got a clear image that contains the font you want, this will identify it for you.

Now, of course, you've got to find that font in True Type to download to your computer. There are lots of sites for fonts. You can go to a graphics site like Veer and search for fonts. These tend to be a little pricey.  You can go to a free font site like dafont.com and start searching. Looking for a free font to match the font you've chosen can take a little time. Sometimes you'll be helped out by a description that contains the words "similar to" and references a font you're looking for. Look around, experiment. Download a number of fonts and plug them into your design and see if it gives you the look you're going for. Make sure you decrease your design image to thumbnail size. What looks great big may be just a blob small.

What I Did

When I was looking to design the covers for the mystery series, I had to think about what I wanted to present to my desired audience. When a reader looks at my book, what associations do I want them to make? I decided to go with what's called the "big book look." This consists of a bold background image over which can be placed the title and the author's name in big, bold letters. I chose this because I was targeting readers that might pick up books by Kathy Reichs or Tess Gerritsen or Patricia Cornwell. I have a backup plan that goes a different direction, because while I think the mystery series will appeal to the readers of those books, it will also appeal to readers of cozier, funnier books. Those covers would be more brightly colored, with a font that's friendlier and not so bold. The great thing is, if I want to switch covers next week, I can. (That's, as Stephen King would say, another story for another time.)

Going back to the present covers, I looked on Amazon for covers of mystery series by women authors featuring women protagonists that I read regularly. I looked at covers until I found a font that I loved and that fit the picture in my mind's eye. I copied the cover, went to WhatTheFont and found out the font name and then did a search for fonts until I found some "similar to" fonts that were free for commercial use. I downloaded several and plugged them into the design until I got what I was look for. Then, using Adobe Photoshop, I adjusted the font size, beveled it slightly, gave it some depth with shading and it was good to go. This was all done with no special knowledge, just a decent design program and the will to experiment. 

(Oh, and about those other covers? I've gotten feedback from some readers -- and looked at the "also bought" suggestions from Amazon -- and realize that the series might better be represented by cozier covers. So I'm going to do an experiment and design a new set of covers and see what happens. This is a definite plus for indie publishing: the ability to hone the presentation of your work. Updates coming.)

Link of the Day

Mentioned on The Book Designer Blog is a fantastic site for fonts that I was heretofore unaware of.  Font Squirrel is a great site with tons of swell free commercial use fonts.  I collect fonts like some people collect stamps or coins or hideous ceramic figurines, so it's like being a kid in a candy store. Check it out!

Adventures in Formatting - Part 3: Kindle, the Final Frontier

First an update: in the interim between posts, the short stories published to Smashwords have all been accepted to the Premium Catalogue, which provides distribution through various other outlets, including Barnes and Noble' s Nook, the Apple iBookstore, Kobo, Diesel, etcetera. Final thoughts? Following the Smashwords Style Guide to the letter will produce a properly formatted manuscript across all platforms.

Now, on to the Kindle. People get nervous about formatting for the Kindle, because it's important to have a professional product that looks good on the e-reader. One of the biggest complaints readers have is poorly formatted e-books.

We first assumed that we would be able to just upload the Mobi file produced by Smashwords into the Kindle interface and that would be it. Well, not so fast. First, as Richard mentioned earlier, make sure you take out your Smashwords information and change it to Kindle information. We noticed that after we had uploaded the first manuscript. Oops.

Second, carefully check the Kindle preview. Everything looked great, except for the fact that we lost all paragraph indents. I'm still not sure why. I did some research and anecdotal information indicated that it would show up fine once published, even though we couldn't get it to look right in Kindle Preview. Not willing to trust that, we endeavored to fix it.

What we finally did was save the manuscript in "filtered HTML" in Word. We then zipped the saved file and uploaded it. But then none of our internal graphics showed up. OH NOES! Back to the forums, where we learned that we had to add each individual graphic to the zip file and upload the whole thing. With that done, the package showed up correctly in the Kindle preview with everything intact.

Yahtzee! It only took an hour or two (with all the research added in) to get a Kindle e-book that is indistinguishable from a professionally formatted e-book. After two days, the books had gone through the Amazon approval process and were live.

So what we learned from the exercise outlined in these formatting posts? That even if you're pretty much a technical noob, as long as you can follow directions you can format your own books and you can do it as well as someone you would pay to do it.

If you're looking at self-publishing, you have four areas where you may incur expenses: design, editing, proofreading, and formatting. While I'm attempting to do all of these at no cost, each individual author will have to look at their budget and decided what they can pay for and what they NEED to pay for. I would say that if your budget is squeezed, formatting is the one area where you can learn how to perform the task as well as a professional.