The Short, Unhappy Life of a Rushed Book Cover

I am, by nature, the most impatient of assholes.  Whether it's traffic on the motor bank lanes at First Federal, televised State of the Union addresses, or the unique corporate torture of only three out of 18 checkout registers which stay open at Target during peak shopping, I have just never liked waiting my turn, plain and simple.  Which can make for a damned unattractive trait in an indie writer doing his or her own book covers.

What's that?  Fuck the world, you say?  You want it all and you want it right now?  Okay, let me take you for a walk on the impatient side and impart the lessons that left me scarred and listening to Billy Joel for days on end.

The original cover, bland as a Sunday
pancake with no butter or syrup...

I slipped and tumbled into this abyss early this year when I was hopping to go live on Amazon with my first short story, which I had called, at that time, Squirters.  It was the first piece of fiction I was about to circulate, and I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (I don't remember where I heard that line, but I readily admit I clearly stole that one).  However, thanks to what turned out be a very misleading title, despite 99.9% of the population expecting titillation and porn, I gave them a supernatural war story instead, and a pretty pissed off, otherwise expectant readership was born.  But poor title selection was just the beginning of this mess I made.

Because there's this: the tumult of book cover design goes beyond the usual headache of should I pay a professional or do my own?  A professional, just like any industry, will charge you based on complexity of the thought process, and unless you are buying one of the designer's stock covers, you will not get what you pay for if the road is traveled in fits and starts.  When I was in my teens, I had trouble selecting the exact snippet of a song that would best represent my individuality for my answering machine, so you can see my problem there.  And I haven't outgrown the habit, so indecision can kill this tete-a-tete collaboration really fucking fast.

You have to remain actively involved in the progress of the design, or even a customized job may not work out for you.  Even worse, if the soul of a bitchy art director is trapped inside your body trying to get out, you may also end up frustrating the book cover designer or graphic artist you're working with, and the partnership will end with someone flipping the bird, billing for time spent, and perhaps even a veiled reference to Yoko Ono will be muttered.

Well, I decided not to go that route, for those aforementioned reasons.  I don't have and have never used Photoshop because back in the mid-90's I failed to master the unique male compulsion for retouching photos of women's boobs and lady bits, so that skill set was out.  Plus, Photoshop is expensive and unless it is for a full-time career move, better to grab a Dodge instead of a Lamborghini for your first trip out on the back roads, know what I mean?  Instead, I patrolled the Google landscape and found my way to a couple of free (emphasis on free) graphics programs (GIMP, which you can download here, and Inkscape, downloadable here) and began one of the fastest and most intense learning-curve marathons known to man.

Once that was done, I needed what any red-blooded nerd trapped in his mother's basement with a bag of Doritos and an overclocked Alienware will need: images.  A plethora of images.  And here I was at a real roadblock because not only does my mother have no basement, but I hate Doritos and I can't afford another Alienware.  So I just tapped my Asus laptop on its smooth little forehead and told it, "Go fetch."

A big, big note here: if you are tempted to just find, copy and use any image floating through the digitalsphere...DON'T.  Just don't.  There is a mine field of copyright infringement lawsuits just waiting to shred you and your checking account to pieces -- and a phalanx of online, Starbucks-sipping, Arcade Fire-listening, website-chasing lawyers who have nothing better to do than try to make a quick one or two grand in billable hours filing on unsuspecting or impetuous writers (like me).  Basically, if you are not the person who took the photo or generated the original image, you do not have any ownership rights to re-use that image, in ANY fucking way, unless the owner of that image gives you said permission first.  (And you'd better get it in writing, too).

So the sources I decided to use for this maiden effort came from some Department of Defense websites, mainly because photographs taken by soldiers on active duty are considered to be in the public domain under Section 105 of the US Copyright Act.  NASA is also good, all those astronauts and their high-resolution cameras really have a public-domain gold mine going on if you're a sci-fi writer.  Specifically, the disclaimers on Wikimedia Commons will say something like the phrase below, corresponding to the following image:

This image or file is a work of a U.S. Air Force Airman or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties.  As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain.

So that's the first thing you should check, and then you can use the image as I've done below:

Credit: U.S. Air Force photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Note that even public-domain images need attribution, and Wikimedia Commons will actually have a link on the image page telling you what this attribution should state.

You may run into a lesser form of public domain that will say something else, like this:

The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed.  Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.

Which is almost as good as public domain, except that you absolutely have to credit the copyright holder, because copyright is still with the owner of the image, not you.  So you do something like what I've done with an image under this license below:

Credit: By Georgios Pazios (User:Alaniaris) (Own work)
[Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

Don't be alarmed by the selection of photos, I'm not planning on bombing any small industrialized nation anytime soon.  I searched for jet fighters and the results provided included the images above.  This can be done with any kind of image that you may be looking for, just like a Google search, except you're going through the Wikimedia Commons repository where most images which are uploaded were intended to be shared, albeit with one or two restrictions.  This will yield better search results than using Google, where a majority of your image search results will probably include copyrighted images.

My revised attempt; and guess what?
It still sucked...

Now, am I a patent and trademark lawyer?  No.  This is all based on information I read on Wikimedia Commons, and if some bloodsucker comes after me, I'm going to encourage them to go rifle through Jimmy Wales' coffers, not mine.  But his Wikimedia Commons page has great information on the images that it has to offer, I doubt that it is there to lead you astray, and it will even tell you if the images are public domain, if they can be re-used with credit given (which is a really small price to pay, so just pay it already), or if there are other restrictions which the copyright owners have imposed on sharing or using the images.  It's all explained in legalese that's as clear as mud, but bottom line, try to go for stuff that won't get you strung up by your thumbs in a courtroom.

There is also a much easier solution to this and that is going out and taking your own photos.  At least, it's easier from a copyright-holding perspective as long as there are no people in your shot.  But I'm a lousy photographer, I don't know a damned thing about filters or shutter speeds or whatnot.  And if you are taking photos of random people on the street, you'll need to get a release from each and every one of them before you can even think of using their faces or likeness for commercial purposes.  If you commission a model for a photo session, however, they usually sign such a release, but you are also paying them for that photo session.  See how complicated this can get?

Finally, a photo that doesn't involve
worrying about fucking copyright...

Notice that nowhere thus far have I mentioned the dark art of skill that needs to be applied to these creative bursts of hemorrhoid-like flare-ups.  Oh sure, you can go out and decide to comb through the offerings of eBay and learn everything there is to learn about designing book covers -- and if you're going to do that, go buy Chip Kidd's excellent introductory book, A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design, which distills a good chunk of his vast professional knowledge into a very approachable treatment of the subject.  Seriously.  It is that good.

However, even after a revised cover, I saw the zero-sum sales on my KDP page and figured it was time for some professional CPR.  So after some perusing, I found a website and graphics developer at SkyRuby.com which charged me very reasonable rates to prop up what was at that point a dead body and try to at least make it look like it had once walked the earth as a living thing.  This is where I discovered how detail-oriented and obsessive I could be over even the tiniest details.

Call this chaper The Adventure of the Skull Moon...I could write an entirely separate post on the imagery that haunted my brain, just trying to get that thing right.  The skull moon was a key image in my concept of the cover design, you see.  But the original skull moon was this:

Revision No. 3; or How I Learned To Stop
Worrying and Prematurely Love
My Skull Moon...

I had decided to change the title and was using a half-assed placeholder title, but I still wasn't feeling that skull moon...it looked sad and maybe a little hungry, like a kitty cat that just wants to be let inside the house.  Those Special Forces soldiers aren't heading into danger, they're embarking on a mission of feline mercy to deliver a bowl of milk.  And the title?  Might as well have called it Waiting for Cuddles.

Problem was that I had already told the designer that I was happy with the outcome...but I wasn't.  It was like tasting jalapeno poppers for the first time: you don't really know it at first, but you keep eating them and suddenly get up from the table knowing that, somewhere along the way, you've made a grave mistake.  And this is a key thing to remember when you are working with a professional: don't be afraid to speak up.  You're paying for services rendered, you have to be able to say what's on your mind.  This isn't your marriage, no one's going to bitch you out for admitting you hate to get up early to take out the trash...um, yeah, anyway.  So I emailed her again the next morning and said, Hey, we need to talk...

The designer I worked with was very patient, and she charged by the hour but she brought mad skills to the game and worked very fast, and in a matter of just two hours (I shit you not) I had a much better skull moon, the best one I think I will ever find.

And what did I end up with?  A final cover, which now looks exactly like this:

Prey.  That's right. Prey.  As in, "pray" that this is the last
fucking change this asshole makes to his book cover...

The moral of the story is yes, I am a control freak, yes I drove my cover designer crazy andd you can, too!  But fuck it because you know what?  You will get a cover design that is much closer to what you envisioned than if you were to hand the reins to a publishing firm.  Publishing firms have their own designers and art departments and they decide on a marketing plan, not you.  They decide what your cover will look like, not you.  They may even decide to change the title of the book, and suck it up, buttercup.

I'm made of much more arrogant, self-centered stuff.  I want my ideas, my concepts, my execution out there.  This is not the way for everyone; I sincerely understand that.  For those who have already reached the hallowed halls of traditional publishing, giving up final cut, as it were, in exchange for the freedom to write more stuff may be exactly what they want and need.  But I'm having a hell of an adventure in this indie environment, and I'm in no particular rush to do anything except enjoy the ride.

I'm speaking non-pornographically, of course.