So yesterday started really well with all the usual chores. I hung a washload out, put another one through, fed and watered the garden birds, emptied the dishwasher, started to fill it again, caught up on social media, etc, etc, etc. And, of course, my dirty cuppa. Then I sat at my desk where my first actual job of the day was to write a book review. And it all kind of snowballed from there.
First of all, I began by thinking about the garden birds and how quickly their food runs out during the spring and early summer. And I started to research large-capacity feeders, hanging and ground-feeding. Boy, was that a deep rabbit hole! I must have spent an hour scrolling and I forgot to drink my dirty cuppa, so when I made a fresh one, I relocated to the office where I opened up the browser and continued my search. After quite possibly another completely wasted hour, I eventually narrowed it down to a handful, but I was very aware I needed to drag myself back up this hole and get on with some work.
Once in work-mode, I couldn’t find a single version of the ebook I was reviewing that still had my notes annotated. I should have just called it a day then. Instead, I checked through all of my files to make sure I hadn’t already created the flyer for this book. I hadn’t. I headed to Photopea, but when I went to add the cover to the mockup, I didn’t have that either. So off I went in search of an image I could use. It has to be a minimum size or the mockup doesn’t work very well.
I found the book cover image and saved it, and I created the mockup, saved an image of that, uploaded it to Canva and added it to the Instagram- and Twitter-sized images for book reviews. I saved them both, and then noticed I had the previous graphics saved three times: Once in the book reviews – flyers folder, once in the mockups folder and again in my downloads folder. So I moved all the extras to the bin.
I hadn’t yet got around to writing the outstanding book review…
No worries, though. I’d get around to it soon enough. But while I was in Canva I decided that I prefer the Wordsworth Shorts branded book covers to the Stevie Beck short story branded book covers. The Stevie Beck brand is great for the novellas, but I decided that as Marcie Craig doesn’t get her own brand for short stories, then neither should Stevie. So I opened up the Wordsworth Shorts collection and transferred over the short story book cover designs from the Stevie Beck collection.
In my excitement, I accidentally deleted an actual novella book cover. And I couldn’t find it anywhere. Not even in the Canva recycle bin. So I had to make that one again. It’s for Stevie Beck and the Haunted House Hotel, which is one of my favourite covers, and fortunately I have jpg and png files of it in a couple of places (the great novella challenge folders and the Horvale mysteries folder), and I was able to replicate the cover in Canva using one of those as a guide. Relatively easy-ish, but time-consuming all the same.
I was still in Canva when I decided then to put all of the Marcie Craig covers into one place. There are 5 Marcie Craig covers and I had 5 designs. Night Crawler, The Beast Within, Snowblind, Flowers in the Rain, The Song Remains the Same. So I then moved them all into one, renamed it ‘Marcie Craig covers’, and deleted the others, forcing myself to ignore the fact that I also need an omnibus cover for these books…(Brownie point to me there for not starting it.)
I finally dragged myself away from the Canva and came onto the website to update the sidebar with the ‘coming soon’ book covers. I uploaded the new Wordsworth Shorts cover for Stevie Beck and the Egg Thief, which appeared in the January edition of Words Worth Reading. It now has a different cover, but that’s okay. Every story that appears in the bookazine gets at least another proofread before being made a standalone, or whatever. Why not use a different cover too? They’re my books and I can do what I want with them.
According to my publication schedule, Words Worth Reading Issue 3 is due out next, followed by The Mucky Duck and The Egg Thief, which both appeared in Issue 2. Once Issue 3 is out, I’ll be looking at publishing the stories in there, and that means the next 3 stories are Elvis is Missing, The Battle of Stubbins Bridge and The Ace of Swords. I already had 2 of those covers ready, but I didn’t have one for The Battle of Stubbins Bridge.
So off I pootled back to Canva to create a cover for the Stubbins Bridge story. It’s a fun, light-hearted tale that I did for 12 Stories in 12 Months (2024) when I couldn’t think of anything else to write for the prompt, and it’s going to be in Words Worth Reading Issue 3.
When I was happy with the new cover, I came back onto here and added it to the sidebar, and noted with annoyance that the bookazine cover is still a different size to all the other book covers. The bookazine cover is in Affinity, which is where all of my cover designs should really start. So off I went to research how I can find out the size of the covers in Canva. It took me a few goes but I got there.
Once I had the dimensions, I duplicated the Affinity file for the bookazine and resized the pages, but all that did was blow up the existing designs so they overlapped the page size. So then I wasted precious time again resizing everything, using just the first one as an example. When it was finished, I uploaded it to the sidebar here, but it was still a different size to all the others! I had more research to do. And when I went back to Affinity, I saw that the document size hadn’t registered both of my dimensions. It had taken just the one but proportionally sized the other one. I tried to change it a few times, but could only get one or the other to work. 😩
I knew there was proportional sizing in there somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. I was about to go off to search that when I noticed a little icon in between the 2 dimension sizes. I toggled it off, put the dimensions in again, and it kept them! Yay! And when I went to look at the actual designs, it had automatically changed them all! Yay! I downloaded the first one again and uploaded it to here and it worked! The bookazine cover is now the same size as all the others! YAY! And then I went and created the cover for Issue 5! I already had Issue 4, but if Catch the Rainbow is ready, I’ll be swapping them around for when Part 1 debuts in Issue 4.
This means I now have a template I can use for all of my other book covers, and I’d far rather create them in an application I actually own rather than one I pay an annual subscription to that can be whipped away in an instance. But I have more than 70 publications already published. It’s going to be a big job to get them all replicated, or duplicated, in Affinity. But the covers will be better, the colours will be better, and the designs will be all mine. Going forward, I’ll start with the next one.
I’m already looking at stock image libraries from where I can buy the correct licenses, instead of using those that come with my professional Canva subscription. I’m already looking at Vellum so I can design my own ebooks rather than relying on an aggregator that’s started randomly deleting user accounts and all the books in them. If I can design all my own artwork too, then I’ll have a proper little cottage industry going.
BUT…the day was almost over and I hadn’t done a stroke of proper work. I shared the Diane’s Gig List post, plus a load of posts about the Meta/LibGen thing, and I fired off an email to the publisher regarding the client edit author as well as one of my own books appearing on the LibGen database. And that was it. I didn’t write the review, I didn’t write and schedule today’s post, I didn’t do any other work.
And that, my friends, is the snowball effect.
It means yesterday’s jobs are now today’s, and I already have a full list for today.
Have a great weekend!
That was a lot of design work. Whew!
It certainly was!