The Evolution of Covers

 When I first started to make covers for Eric Filler books, they were pretty primitive.  A lot of that is from September 2014-March 2015 I was living in various motels from here to Seattle to Arizona and back again, so I only had the PowerPoint on my laptop to work with.

As time has gone on, I've tried to get a little more sophisticated.  Like some graphic "artists" at publishers like Solstice Publishing, I've tried to do more layering images.  I might get a picture of a woman from a stock photo site and then eliminate the background (which can be tricky) and then put it over a background.  Something I found recently in PowerPoint is there's a "Smooth Edges" tool that can help to take some of the edges off one picture so when you paste it on a background it doesn't stick out so much.  But you have to be careful or else you can wipe out too much edge and have pictures that look unnatural or just have holes in them.

Having use of a desktop computer makes it easier to download fonts.  You can pay for fonts, but there are enough free ones that I can usually get by.  In the last few months I've tried to get a little more creative in placing the titles, like maybe off to one side instead of just centered.  One like this kind of uses all that stuff I just talked about:

On Facebook I talked about the cover for my latest release, Hitchswapper.  It's a story about a guy who picks up a hitchhiker who turns him into a woman and they go from Oklahoma to LA and fall in love and stuff.  It was a fun story in that I used a lot of my traveling experience in 2014, at least until it gets to the LA part.

So for this cover I first wanted a picture of a female hitchhiker.  I couldn't find a great one for free.  I finally settled on this one with a lady with her thumb up.  The sign she's holding was originally white but I recolored it a light brown to look more like cardboard.  And then I used a font to make it look sort of like the words were painted on.  I dug around for a background that would show a Route 66 sign because most of the story takes place on the old Route 66.  I found this one that has it painted on the road.

In the story the main character buys a 1958 Ford Thunderbird convertible for his road trip down Route 66 from Chicago to LA.  I looked around online to find a sort of classic car looking font to use on the title and author name.  The first one I found was too wide, so I went with this other one.  Since the title is only one word (not a real word) I just centered it across the cover.

This was my first draft then:

Looking at it, something really bugged me:  there was a lot of empty space on the right side.  Maybe other people wouldn't have paid much attention to it, but my eyes kept going right to it.  

So I looked around and found a picture of a 1958 T-Bird, cut out the background and it fit in really well on the pavement of the old gas station or whatever in the background.  It's probably not exactly to scale, but who really cares?  Then I moved the author name a little bit to the right and down a few lines.

Also, when I looked at the picture for this entry, I noticed that her thumb looked really skinny, like a finger.  I  had the Soft Edges thing turned up too high so it cut off a lot of her thumb.  So I turned the Soft Edges down a little and used a copy of her thumb from the original to make it look more normal size.

This is the final result:

Obviously it's not as good as if I could pay a model to go out to a Route 66 sign with a T-Bird, but considering I paid a grand total of $0 I think it's pretty good.

Here's an example of a bad cover from someone else's book:

Basically what this guy did was take the cover he'd made for the paperback and then for whatever reason use the Kindle template.  As you can see he's got the title and the author name on it twice!  It looks ridiculous.  When I pointed this out on whatever Facebook group, someone (I don't think the author) said, "It's his cover and he likes it!"  So he likes garbage?  It's no wonder he hasn't sold a copy; if he's that lazy about the cover, what about the book inside?  Hasn't he even seen a book cover before?  Also, no one puts "By" on the cover.  Yeesh.