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!

What I Did This Week - April 23

Well, this week started off with a visit from the flu fairy. After the small child got sick, I got sick (and I mean deathly sick, like curled up in bed under 4 blankets, drifting in and out of consciousness while disaster-porn played on the SyFy channel) which tanked the weekend, thereby tanking the rewrite on the first 7 chapters of Darker By Degree. Sound familiar, all you writers with little germ-laden kiddies? And so it's been catch-up since then.

Tried to keep up with the blogs. Added a bunch to my list to explore further. Did not post much of anything.

Finished the short story covers, as you can see in the post previous to this one. That was actually pretty fun. So they're ready to go when formatting is ready on the stories.

I am now on the Twitter. Yes, I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. So now you can follow me on Twitter (yay!) and I can wax poetic in 140 characters, which to anyone who has ever spoken to me or read anything I've ever committed to print knows is going to be a real challenge. As a bonus, I learned how to shorten URLs using Bitly which is so simple that I managed not to screw it up on first blush.

Set up an author's website that will serve as a somewhat static site or landing page once the books start to go live. For now, I used a generic template on Blogger. Easy-peasy and can be changed at a moment's notice with no knowledge of any HTML or really any technical skills.  You can find it here at KeriKnutson.blogspot.com.

I am today hard at work on short blurbs for Running Red and Darker by Degree, along with spiffing up the opening chapters of both those books for inclusion as sneak previews in the short stories. Blurbing is hard. Like writing-a-synopsis hard. I keep dithering on the length. When I get the blurbing completed, I'll post them up.

For now it is back to the grindstone/salt mines/torture chamber. Looking on having the short stories live (with sneak previews of the novels) by the end of the week.

What I Did This Week - April 15

As usual, hit the blogs.

• Dean Wesley Smith talks about saturating your platforms in Think Like a Publisher #7...A Sales Plan
• At Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer new author Tara Woolpy describes her journey to self-publishing her new book.
• At Joe Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, successful author Bob Mayer talks about self-publishing his new historical novel, and as usual, lots of great comments.

Found out that Photoshop is hard, yo. There is a learning curve. But luckily my daughter Cadia is both brilliant and well-schooled, so she is giving me a crash course in what I need to know.

Susan and I finished the final edit on the second Maddie Pryce novel, Director's Cut, so it moves onto proofreading. We are so happy with Director's Cut that we realize the previous novel, Darker By Degree, needs to be spruced up to be just as good. This realization if followed by brainstorming, which washes away some of our previous conventions and necessitates the need for a new character, the dropping of a whole wishy-washy chapter, and lots of new action. Great, but time-consuming. Which brings us to the editorial part of the post.

Writers always have to grapple with a time crunch. So many ideas, so little time. When you add the burdens of learning self-publishing, it sometimes feels like a cinderblock or three has been carelessly balanced on your head. Between home life, work life, writing life, now you've got more? Take blogging, for instance, it's not just the transfer of ideas or the sharing of information, it's self-marketing and research. Reading other people's blogs and commenting, writing one of your own, it's an important step is increasing the public's awareness that you exist. It a channel for showcasing your books when they're published. Blogging is not going to make or break you in itself, but when nobody knows who you are or what you write, you need to take every opportunity to put yourself out there. And to make blogging count, you've got to cross-promote it just as hard as you're cross-promoting your writing.

My goal is to post on both my blogs daily (or at least every weekday), but it's hard. Not only do I have to find the time to write a post, but I have to come up with something cool or interesting or worthwhile to say. Aye, there's the rub. I feel like I've been channeling all my cool/interesting/worthwhile into the new outline for the rewrite, and there's precious little left over. But next week is another week and I'll keep plugging away. This weekend the peeps go camping, and in the relative quite I'm going to finish the the 7-chapter-arc rewrite that I spent 12 hours yesterday ironing out. If anything else cool or interesting or worthwhile comes to my attention in the meantime, you'll be the first to know.

What I Did This Week - April 8

This weeks was devoted to research and playing around.

I came across some worthwhile blogs which you should check out:

Write To Publish by Robin Sullivan

The Writings and Opinions of Dean Wesley Smith

I found a nifty royalty-free stock photography and illustration site with pricing about a third of what Veer and iStockphoto charge. Deposit Photos has a free trial with downloads, very reasonable pricing, and a decent selection. The search function seems comparable with other sites.

I mocked up dozens of covers in Paint in preparation to do the real thing using PhotoShop and Illustrator, and found that I was better at it than I thought. Once I've done the real thing, I'll post a gallery and you can see what someone who is relatively talentless can do in a short time.

Today I"m installing the new software: Adobe InDesign, PhotoShop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro. I'll report back as I start learning the basics.

I made a List for publishing projects that numbers 25, with another 25 ideas on a second page. For the first year, I plan to publish 2 full-length horror/thriller novels (Running Red and Dead of Winter), Susan and my first two Maddie Pryce mystery series novels (Darker by Degree and Director's Cut), and then I plan to have three more books up within the year, (the third Maddie Pryce novel, Curtain Call; the first installment in a lighter paranormal mystery series that's been on my back burner for years and is yet unnamed; and a collection of 9 short stories). Whew! I may not make all of that happen, but I know that by the end of the year I'll have at least five books up and running.

I learned how to use Google Docs, which allows real-time collaborative writing or editing. Great if you're writing with a partner or going over proofing or editing with someone else.

Lastly, I have the first step of my plan finalized. I'm going to publish four short stories via Kindle. (Lots of people who know best strongly suggest you put up a short story or two to learn the formatting and uploading procedures.) I'm going to give two short stories away free and put the other two up for 99 cents a piece, just as an experiment. And at the end of each of the short stories, I'm going to include the cover for Running Red, a brief blurb and the first chapter and tell readers to watch for it coming in July of 2011. Later on I'm going to take the short stories down for inclusion in a compendium, but for now I'm just using them for advertising purposes and to learn the ropes.  So I'm working on covers and descriptions and formatting and hope to have something to show for it before the end of the month.

Wheeeeeee! As they say down here in New Orleans, where you at?