Or how I hired someone to design my novel cover 

Great news! The Holy Diamond cover is made and ready to go! This includes cover, spine, and back cover. All that is left is to actually have a novel to stick between the covers.

And here is the cover! And the novel in paperback (it’s obviously a mock-up, as the novel has not yet been produced).

So, what is involved in making the cover? Did I take a photo, drop it into MS Word, slap on some words, and voila! Instacover?

Or did I go to amazon.com and generate a free cover based on their variety of templates that include layout and stock photos?

No…but these are two cost-free options that I had, as does any aspiring self-publishing writer. As this is my first, grand effort in the field of literary novelization, I wanted to go all out. So I hired a company to make the cover.

You can find out about them here:

https://www.facebook.com/designforwriters 

I sent an initial inquiry, and from there I was put on their workspace web site, where we shared a discussion board with people involved in the cover project.

Here are some of the elements of the cover design process:

• Provide any relevant photos that the cover might include (I sent some and none were used, partly due to uncertainties about copyright)
• Provide any design ideas (I did this, sending my second-grader-quality drawing)
• Answer about twenty questions concerning plot, important scenes, tone, characters, themes, synopsis, etc. Here, I emphasized the theme of music and backpacking adventures.
• Provide the title, sub-title, and back cover text (this is pretty obvious; though I struggled a bit with the sub-title)
• Review a bunch of drafts.

Some months, revisions, and back-and-forths later, with kind input from friends and family, we have the final product (above)!

In a world of unlimited resources I might have hired a design artist who would have individually drawn from scratch the cover. But I only have limited resources. This cover uses a combination of designs, stock photos, and who knows what else.

Is it exactly what I wanted? No. But is it better than MS Word and amazon.com templates! You bet!!