Hello, Writer, and welcome back to my life. It's Writer Wednesday, the day where I
give you my tips and advice on the art and the business of writing, and tell you how
I do what I do as an indie author. Today's question comes to us from patron
Kristen Stevens, who asks: how do you find a cover artist that you like? That's
it. That's the question. Oh boy, this is an interesting question, and I feel like we
have been answering a lot of questions like this recently in terms of people to
work with. We talked about editors recently, we talked about your review
team and beta readers recently, and just as a quick aside, I take that as a good
sign that the writer Wednesday community is growing and more people are needing
to find more people to work with in order to actually take their books to a
done. I hope that's the case with you Feel free to let me know in the comments.
All right. How do you find a cover artist that you like? This is, again, one of those
important ones. It's important because your cover is the number one thing
that's gonna sell your book. I mean, this is such a hackneyed joke in the indie
publishing community, but, "Everybody says you shouldn't judge a book by its cover,
but everybody does, haha." Yes, no, it's a hundred percent true. That's why people
design book covers. If people didn't judge books by their cover, every single
book would just be white paper. Like, cardboard. This would be every book cover
if people didn't judge books by their cover, because you know how long it took
me to put this together? Thirty seconds. So, before you go about choosing your
cover artist, or even beginning the search for your cover artist, you need to
make many very important decisions about your cover. And the primary one of these
decisions that you have to make is, what kind of cover is it going to be? So, I've
talked a lot before about how you need to write what is important to you, right?
You need to write something, not because you think it's gonna be the biggest
moneymaker, or not because you think it's the hot genre right now, because that's
just gonna lead you to a career of misery, but because you want to write it,
because you are passionate about it. And it has to be in a genre that you truly
love, or a combination of genres, if you are, like, mixing and matching things a
little bit. That's fine. It needs to be something that is important to you and
that is important to your heart when you're writing your book. But when it
comes to cover design, you need to throw that whole viewpoint away completely.
Every artist, every author, and particularly every indie author, has to
be able to switch between the art and the business side of things. When you are
working on your book, that is when you put on your artist hat, and you are
working on your craft, and you are working with your passion, and your tools
and your creativity. And then, when it comes to your book cover, you need to, not
just take off your artists hat, you need to put it in the closet, you need to put
it far away, where it is not going to influence your decisions in any way, and
you need to pull your business hat onto your head and strap it under your chin.
Because if you make cover design decisions based off of the the whims of
your heart and, oh, no, but I just—I just really want it to be this way, and
everything like that.... I mean, you can do that. It just won't sell any books. Cover
design is the number one part of writing and indie publishing where you must be
absolutely 100% market-driven in order to get the best results. Now, before
anybody misunderstands or tries to intentionally misunderstand and say that
I'm saying something I'm not, obviously you still have to be honest with your
cover, right? And of course, that IS actually being market-driven. Like, you
can't just design a cover that is going to sell a lot of books but it's not
representative of what's in your book, right? Like, you could design a cover that
was very racy, or looked a certain way, or looked just like a Jack Reacher cover.
You could literally just parrot a Jack Reacher cover. They're usually, like, a textured
background and then a target symbol on the cover somewhere. You could
literally just do that, and people might assume that it was a Jack Reacher cover
and buy it because of that. And then they would be very pissed off at you because
you're not Lee Child, and you didn't actually—it's not actually a Jack
Reacher book. You can't do that. That's not being market-driven that's being
dishonest and criminal. Designing a market-driven cover means finding out
what sells well in your market and doing that in a way that is
representative of the book that your reader is going to read. So, to my mind,
there are three broad categories of book cover design, okay? First is the graphic
cover. This is where there isn't really any art. There maybe aren't people or
anything like that. It's more about the symbolism of the thing, right? This
would be, I mean, maybe like a sort of mediocre example of that. Like, it's—it's
just—it's just a simple graphical symbol that was designed to perfectly
encapsulate what is in this literary book. And literary books is where you
will primarily see graphic covers. Literary books and YA. YA lit books. YA
lit will sometimes get into another one of the categories later, but a lot of
them are graphic, like John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars.' Graphic cover. One
of the best graphic covers ever. And while we're talking about the Green brothers,
Hank Green has a new book that is out for pre-order now, and he just
released the cover on that. Another totally graphic cover. There isn't, like, a
real image on it, it's more of sort of a very simple design that communicates a
lot of meaning. So as I said, generally that type of cover design goes for
literary work, young adult work, and some nonfiction does graphical covers that
are very good. Okay, so, the next broad category of covers is photoshopped
covers. That's what I call them. I call them photoshopped covers. There
could probably be a better and more descriptive name of it, but photoshopped
covers. You get what I mean, right? Mark Dawson's books are perfect
photoshopped covers. They are a photoshopped image of a running guy, usually with a
gun, on a city background, and those are, you know, probably two or three different
stock images that are combined in a creative and artistic way. But
photoshopped images can be a lot more complicated than that, like this is a
photoshopped cover. This is the interim cover of Nightblade, after the first
edition, but before I got my current covers. This is all Photoshop. This is
images that were pulled from stock photo sites and combined to create this image.
Photoshop covers are also massively popular in romance, where you will
Photoshop two people together who are, you know, both very attractive people
representative of the main characters of your story, or, you know, maybe there's a
photo of two people already together. And I've seen photoshopped covers that are also
very very popular in urban fantasy, is a big one, and then there are actually some
really legit looking military sci-fi and other sci-fi photoshopped covers. So you can
definitely do photoshopped covers for genre, it's just very applicable to certain
genres, right? And, of course, the final broad category of cover is the fully
Illustrated cover where every single pixel on the cover (except for the
lettering) is hand-drawn by an artist. These covers can be complex or simple. My
illustrated covers for the individual books, right, tend to just have one
character on the front, so that that's decently simple. You have to get the
character design right, but that's about it. And then for the big volumes, you know,
I have multiple characters from an iconic scene in the book. As you
probably already know, fully Illustrated covers are immensely popular in epic
fantasy. That's pretty much the the default, the go-to standard for an epic
fantasy book is an illustrated book cover. But illustrated covers are also very
popular in sci-fi, particularly space opera, to the point that space opera
covers can easily look a little bit samey. Like, they're all that one image of
the planet in the background and then the tiny little ship flying past it, or
around it, or into it, or, you know, over it or whatever. And they're
great, but I do like some variation from that very very common theme. So the first
big decision that you have to make is what kind of cover are you going to get?
And that is entirely dependent on your genre. If you are writing epic fantasy, I
firmly believe that you must do an illustrated cover. The one prominent
exception that I can think of is George R.R. Martin and the Song of Ice and Fire
books, which are photoshopped covers, right? It's just one simple image on a
textured background. However, even though simple elements, they look like they
could be illustrated. In fact, I'm looking at one on my computer screen right now—
it might be Illustrated. It might be an illustrated cover that just looks kind
of photoshopped. There's a few different ones, and it's questionable,
right? If you're writing space opera, I think you should have an illustrated
book cover. I haven't done full market research on that, so if you are writing
space opera do your own research and see what works and what people are doing. And
you don't have to do a illustrated cover if you discover that
the biggest space opera books ever didn't have Illustrated covers. If you're
writing urban fantasy or paranormal romance or thriller or
regular romance, you are almost certainly going to want a photoshopped cover. That
is the standard for that genre. That is what readers of that genre are looking
for. And if you're writing YA or young adult or some other genre where that is
applicable, do a graphic cover. That is that is the first decision, because you
can't go and find an amazing Photoshop cover artist
if you're writing epic fantasy. Because it doesn't matter how amazing they are and how
easy they are to work with and how affordable they are. That's not what your
genre demands. And while we're on the subject, just because I could totally see
somebody bringing this up at some point in the future: if you want to talk about
The Name of the Wind and how that is a photoshopped cover...yeah, it's also an
awful cover. This is one of the worst covers I've ever seen come out of
traditional publishing. I'm sorry. It's one of my favorite fantasy books. The
cover is just not great. And I can say that because it's not MY cover artist.
Looking at you, Terry Goodkind. Okay, so you've determined what kind of
cover that you need based on your genre. Now comes an even harder part, or a
slightly less hard part. It's difficult, that's for sure. Now you have
to go about finding the right person. Not just the right person, but the right
person who you can easily communicate and work with. Not just the right person
who you can easily communicate and work with, but the right person who you can
easily communicate and work with and who you can afford. And I have no easy
solution for you. I looked for a very, very, very long time
before I found my current three cover artists, and I tried lots of covers before
them that didn't work out for one reason or another. I have designed entire covers
that were taken to full completion, and of course I paid for them and everything,
and didn't use, because the the vision was not executed. It was not executed
well it was not executed correct—it was executed well, but just that artist and
me didn't jive on what we were going for. And that is the thing. It doesn't mean
that that artist was bad, right? It just means that we aren't in sync enough to
work together as author and cover artist. I know they can turn out great
work. I looked at their portfolio before I hired them.
It's just you, will have compatibility issues just like we talked
about before. You can find a really good editor who YOU cannot work with. And that
doesn't mean that they're a bad editor, it just means that people are people, so
why should it be? So you've got to do the grind, you've got to walk
the beat, you have to go out. You have to look at art websites. Spend a lot of time
on deviantart, if you need an illustrated cover. Or, there good Photoshop
work on deviantart as well. Talk to other authors. Find out who they used. Find
covers from authors who are your contemporaries, who are sort of on your
level, and say where did you get that cover? Talk to a bunch of artists. Find
out how their process works. Find out how much they charge. You're probably
gonna go through about, you know, five artists who you don't work well with, who
would be perfect, and their art is very good, but you don't work well with them,
or you can't afford them, until you finally find the person who you work
well, with you guys are just totally jiving and in sync, and and you can afford it. I
will make a couple of recommendations, and these are people that I know
personally and have worked with in one capacity or another over the years. My
three cover artists for illustrated covers for the Underrealm books are Sutthiwat
Dechakamphu, Sarayu Ruangvesh, and Miguel Mercado, and i will drop links
to all of their websites in the description below. If you're looking for
illustrated covers, you should absolutely hire them. I definitely don't
generate enough work to keep them working full time, and boy do they
deserve to just have stunning careers as amazing artists. If you're
looking for Photoshop covers, Domi over at Inspired Cover Designs is actually
the person who designs the templates for the text of the Underrealm covers. So in
other words, I get the artwork done, and then she does the the layout of the text,
and, you know, my author name and the title of the book and everything like
that. You know, she gives me a template and if I can do it myself easily,
I will, but if I'm futzing around with it and I know that it doesn't look good,
I'll just send it over to Domi and be like, "Yo, can you please just take care of
this?" and I send her some money. I will also drop a link to her website down
below, but it is InspiredCoverDesigns.com .com? not .net? I hope? Anyway. The link
in the description will be correct. And the best person that I can think of for more
graphical covers is Risa Rodil. I have never commissioned a book cover
from Risa, but she is an amazing graphical artist who has done lots of
work with the vlogbrothers and with me for merch. You know that "Have I
Mentioned I Write Books?" t-shirt? That is a Risa piece of artwork,
and if I had a book named "Have I Mentioned I Write Books?" I would totally
take that piece of artwork and just slap that on the cover, you know? So I will
also drop a link to Risa in the description down below. Now realize, all
of these artists are amazing people, they're easy to work with, they are just
super flexible and I have had a great experience with them every single time.
They might not work for you, because some people just don't work together. So if
you do happen to reach out to one of these people and it doesn't work out for
whatever reason, it doesn't mean that they're bad it doesn't mean that you're
bad, it just means that you need to keep searching until you find the people who
you click with. That is what I feel like was a very, very long answer to Kristen's
question. Thank you so much for the question, Kristen, I hope that you and
others found the answer helpful. A reminder to everybody else watching this video that
my $5 patrons on Patreon, like Kristen, are the only people who get to ask
questions for me to answer in this video series, and they get these videos two
weeks ahead of everybody else. So if that sounds interesting to you, check out my
Patreon right over there. You can also check out the entire Writer Wednesday
playlist up there. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next
Wednesday. Bye!
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