My Book Cover Designs

 By Dennis Lantz

Did you ever wonder about book cover designs? Here’s a little background details of how Christy and I do the covers for my books… and how we progressed from my earliest novels to my latest, Curly Mobeck's Near-Life Experience. Each cover has a creation story.

Designing a book cover can be fun, interesting… and frustrating. It’s important to note that I could not do it without Christy. She has computer graphic skills and a type of creativity that I do not possess. She has either designed or redesigned the covers on all of my books. I think she did a fantastic job with the cover of Curly Mobeck’s Near-Life Experience. She also designed the covers for her two books, Thinking of You and Fragments and Fears: A Cocoon of Scars.

There are unique challenges when designing book covers. There are specific details that must be met when you use Amazon’s KDP. In one of the formatting books I use, the author encourages the use of a book cover design company… like fiverr or 99design. Or free design sites like CANVA or the KDP cover creator. He discourages doing it yourself with a program like Adobe Photoshop. Well, we do it ourselves. And Christy uses Adobe Photoshop. There are occasional complications. But the finished products are more personal and representative of the book. It's not just about saving money.

I think that we are a good team. Our procedure is straightforward… in theory. You shouldn’t try to design a cover until the story is formatted… because you need to get a template from KDP Cover Calculator. Of course, you can brainstorm ideas. Just wait until you have a template before you start the design process. The key elements needed for a template from KDP Cover Calculator are the size of your book and the number of pages. You can only know that after formatting is finished. A template allows you to get your image file to exactly the right size.

Now you can start putting together your image. Christy has used photographs, (The Spiders of Eden and Summer in Gentlewoods), scanned artwork (Zander’s Tale)… or used a conglomerate design with graphics and colors. For my last two novels (Pine Street and the Mirrors of Freedom and Curly Mobeck’s Near-Life Experience), we started out with a specific background color… and then added elements. Always remember that the finished art has to fit the template.

For Curly Mobeck, I wanted the cover to be Bristol blue… with some black fog mixed in. For the artwork, I wanted something bright. Like a starburst. The spiral was all Christy’s inspiration. I liked it immediately.

Font is important for book cover design. For Curly Mobeck’s Near-Life Experience, I selected Aladin. As I always do, I went to Google Fonts and typed in the title of the book. Then I scrolled through hundreds of free fonts to find a handful that “fit” with the style of the story. I usually pick five or ten… then play around with them in regular, bold, or capital letters, etc. until I find the perfect look. Some stories are harder to find a font for than others. Zander’s Tale was difficult. Luckily, Curly Mobeck’s Near-Life Experience wasn’t.

Christy continues her magic by laying out the title and my name in their proper place. She asks my opinion, but she doesn’t need it. The cover usually has three sections: the front, the spine, and the back. She puts the title and my name vertically on the spine… and makes sure that it is centered. On the back, she makes a text box and fills it with words that I have written. I often change my mind… which means it isn’t a one-step process. She also adds the price… exactly where the template shows her.

We go over everything. I make changes. She makes changes. When we think we have it exactly like we want… she saves the image as a .pdf file and puts it on a flash drive. I upload it to KDP. Fingers crossed.

Sometimes we forget things. On the first Curly Mobeck file, I forgot to have her include the spine text. That meant more design time and another upload. I only uploaded this cover three times. Which is better than some past efforts.

When everything is ready, I order a proof copy of the book. This is the only way to know how it will look after printing. Sometimes the colors don’t come through exactly as they look on the computer screen. Curly Mobeck’s cover is a little darker in print. But I still like it. We decided to change a small detail on the back cover. Initially there was a small glowing orb in the upper left corner. It didn’t look right. So, we changed it. Well, Christy changed it. And she brightened the color of the back cover text to make it more readable.

As I said, it isn’t always easy, but I enjoy it. Some designs don’t work out the way that you plan them. I’ve discarded many ideas for that reason. Christy is patient. She listens to my ideas and then comes up with something better.

The first book cover we created was for Summer in Gentlewoods. Christy took a lot of pictures in the woods, near the spot where I had my hogan thirty years ago. We didn’t know much about designing book covers then. The colors didn’t translate well because sources gave us conflicting information. Was the image supposed to use CMYK or RGB color formatting? I think that KDP switched at some point. But I don’t know for sure. The Summer in Gentlewoods cover looked MUCH better on the computer screen than print. I think it is my least favorite cover… but that book has sold the most copies.

When the publisher of my first four novels went out of business, it became necessary to republish second editions. This happened at the same time as the publication of Summer in Gentlewoods and Pine Street and the Mirrors of Freedom. Basically, Christy helped me design or redesign six books in a very short period of time.

For Pine Street and the Mirrors of Freedom, I wanted a particular light blue color. One evening we were out on our back patio. I looked at the sky. “That’s the color I want!” I exclaimed… and snapped a picture with my phone. She used it. I told her that I wanted some streaky white in the blue background. Not really clouds. As an explanation, I showed her a photograph I took of a computer screensaver from work. It was blue, not white. Even so, she was able to change the color and incorporate just a hint of it. The last elements I wanted were drones. Shane and Coly Adamcik sent pictures of their drone to Christy. Only the moon was not organic.

The original cover for The Spiders of Eden was designed by an intern for BEB Publishing. It was dark and mechanical… and my favorite at the time. Unfortunately, the files were not available when we published the second edition, so we had to come up with a completely different cover. I wanted a black and yellow garden spider with a web. Getting such an image in a timely fashion would have been difficult. Luckily, Jim Cole, a local nature photographer, willingly allowed the use of one of his images. Christy turned that into one of my favorite covers.     

Zander's Tale, which I consider my first novel, even though it was published concurrently with The Spiders of Eden and Pine Street and the Mighty Mutation Circus, features an original watercolor painting by Amy Evans. The first edition cover was altered by BEB Publishing so that the title would fit properly. When Christy and I worked on the second edition, she didn’t want to alter the artwork as it had been done in the first edition. We decided to change the location of the title. I liked the font for the first edition…. but could not find it. We had to choose another. It was different, but we thought that it accentuated Amy’s art.

The covers for Pine Street and the Mighty Mutation Circus and Pine Street and the Dino-Beast Clones remained essentially the same. But they still took a lot of Christy’s time. Basil E. Bacorn designed the originals… and I purchased the rights. Unfortunately, none of the images I had were of sufficient size. Christy scanned the books and reworked the title graphics. Then she added new text and numbers. (The Pine Street series has three books and are numbered on the spines.) Even though the covers look identical to the original editions, they were reworked.

We have already discussed covers for upcoming books. Two books about The Healing Project… and a future novel. Hopefully, they go smoothly. But we won’t start them until they are completely formatted and ready for a template.

Book covers should not only be eye-catching, but they must give you an idea of what the book is about, even if only on an emotional level. The cover for Curly Mobeck’s Near-Life Experience reminds me of an evening sky filled with mysterious heavenly elements. A representation of the great unknown. And I think that fits the story perfectly. 

Until next time,

Read, Learn, Live.

Dennis

Dennis Lantz is the author of Zander's Tale. The Spiders of Eden, and the Pine Street Trilogy (Pine Street and the Mighty Mutation Circus, Pine Street and the Dino-Beast Clones, and Pine Street and the Mirrors of Freedom.) His nonfiction Summer in Gentlewoods uses journal entries to tell the real-life adventure of living in a primitive shelter in the woods of his family farm. Two books about The Healing Project are coming soon. 

Dennis and his wife, Christy, live in Warren Center, Pennsylvania. They share their home with Austin, a Texas rescue who is a cross between a Jack Russell and an angel.

For more information visit www.dennislantz.com or follow Dennis Lantz Books on Facebook.