Getting a Book Cover
My outline for Norton the Third now has a total of about 170 incidents, or beats. Of those, I've got about 30 left to write. I've been rockin' and rollin' on this now since I got retired in mid-November, and am making pretty good progress. Even including all the interruptions that life provides, I can get two or three beats drafted and cleaned up in a work day. Doing the math, and allowing for unavoidable side trips -- such as taking my granddaughter to the zoo -- it's pretty clear I'm now in grave danger of finishing the thing.
Two major steps remain before I can hit the "publish" button on Amazon. The biggest is getting the draft edited, but fortunately, I have three grown children, all of whom are very literate, know the story well, and who have offered to help. Those college tuition dollars are at last paying off!
The remaining challenge is creating a compelling, eye-catching, sophisticated and unique cover for the book -- in this case, the e-book, since I don't intend to distribute Norton in paper form. For a while I figured I'd just "slap together something" using Photoshop. I have rather extensive, if amateur, experience doing this, as I've prepared the business cards, ads and internet artwork for Woodside Community Theatre's productions for many years. However, several hours of "slapping" produced no satisfying result, so I went to Mr. Google and asked for help.
It turns out there is a veritable industry out there focused specifically on creating covers for novels (and this, in turn, indicates there must be legions of people like me writing novels)!
Some artists have developed generic book covers ready for authors to use -- just add the book title and your name. Once an author adopts (and pays around $100) for one of these pre-built designs, the specific design is taken off the market, so the author gets an exclusive. Here's an example of one such service. There are probably dozens of them.
I spent a couple evenings pawing through pre-built designs, hoping for a match with the style and content of Norton The Third, but this was a long shot, and it didn't pan out. Norton is unusual; it follows characters from three centuries of North American history. Some of them were real people, some are made up, and some a little bit of both. A few, shall we just say, are a little far-fetched (and I'm talking here about real ones!). The generic pre-built covers are good for vampire or science fiction stories, but not for this one.
Other internet-based artists specialize in creating book covers on demand. Here, the author's challenge is to select one. I spent another couple of evenings digging through offerings from these folks, and finally settled on one of them. The choice was pretty easy; a lot of people recommended her, and her several pages of sample work demonstrated talent, variety and creativity.
Jane Dixon-Smith is located in the United Kingdom. We exchanged email, and I gave her a two-page summary of Norton The Third, along with some cover ideas I had been unable to render into pixels. I paid her an initial fee of $200, and she went to work. A few more emails, and a week or so later, she sent me four sample proposals (the illustration on this page is a small clip from one of them; I'd show you the whole thing but then the stock image company would require I kill you). We're now going to refine one of them; when we're done, I get a book cover, and she gets another $200.
Update: I'm totally happy with Jane's work. She did exactly what she promised and produced a cover that will absolutely "fit in" with other adventure-historical-fantasy books on Amazon. It looks rather like this.
I had no right to ask her for something that looks like this, however. Another approach is being considered. Watch this space.