And just like that…it’s Friday again! Crikey.
I feel as though I’ve wasted an entire week, but actually, I should stop beating myself up. I spent several days working on new covers for the Stevie Beck/Horvale Mystery series and in the end I was torn between two different types of artwork.
The artwork I preferred was quite dark and grown up. But after days of agonising and getting the fonts right, I decided that cosy mysteries aren’t supposed to be dark and grown up. They’re supposed to be bright and playful. The other images I found were more suited to, say, Marcie Craig stories than they were to the very cosy mysteries. Especially when there isn’t even always a body drop.
So after hours and hours of thinking hard, and searching for and finding a ‘crooked’, playful font, I settled on the more colourful and cheerful artwork to go with it.
The other thing I wanted was for my byline to ‘pop’, rather than blend into the background. So for that I settled on a solid white upper case white font outlined in black to make it stand out more.
I toyed with changing the text colours too, thinking I might create and use a standardised palette, for example. But in the end I left the book title in orange outlined in black and the subtitles in plain white.
This has taken up a lot of my working time this week, when I had a lot of other stuff to do as well. But it did need doing, and by the time I had the template I liked in Affinity, created by me, it was so much easier to just duplicate the cover, drop in the image, adjust the image if necessary (e.g. flip it if too many have the MC facing the same way, or line it up better so the text doesn’t get lost against it, etc.), and change the book title.
The more I played with Affinity Publisher for this, the quicker I got at it, and that’s one of the points too. To get quicker at using the tools I have.
I did manage a couple of other things too yesterday, such as watch another Christmas cosy novella workshop Zoom recording, and do a bit more towards the bookazine. But now I have to step away from the covers and crack on with some writing.
Temperatures crept up into the 90s yesterday, and we’re set to have more of the same today and tomorrow. Oh, joy.
A short and sweet post this time, as I’ve been doing so much of the same thing all week. And I wanted to at least try and get today’s blog post finished and scheduled if I could.
Today I have a dermatology appointment at the hospital, and Grand-doggy #1 goes home later, but we’ve been asked if we’d like to look after Grand-doggy #2 next week, which of course we would. I have an assignment to finish and submit, a short story to finish, and a novella to keep working on. And we have a gig at the weekend.
Whatever you’re up to, have a good one.
Yeah, covers have to fit genre style, which is kind of annoying. They also take a lot of time.
Have fun with the dog! And have a great weekend!
Thank you!