Well, I have resigned myself to changing covers again. Since I entered into this Kindle world in December, I have been trying to learn what readers want in a cover. I am keeping in mind a few key points: A) I cannot forget selling is a business, B) I am not the average buyer; and C) A reader won't even get to the story to decide if it works for them-- if they hate the cover.
So within reason I am open to changing to what works... hopefully. That does not mean ordering a custom cover for hundreds of dollars or paying a graphic artist likewise amount of money. Truthfully my books may not meet the average reader's desire no matter what I do. BUT they won't even get a chance with the wrong cover.
I liked my original covers. Although they were different than the Kindle book covers, they were similar to those I had seen out in the stores. Key point here-- this is Kindle. And what works for a published writers is not necessarily what will work for an indie writer where the reader already suspects they don't have the talent to write an exciting and meaningful story.
The covers I created when I recognized the problem frankly aren't ones that would excite me to buy a story. I might look at it anyway but those covers, symbolic or not look dull. When I can't sleep at night, I have thought about what might work instead and spent more hours than I can tally up with this issue. The one thing I know for sure is I am open to changing. I believe in my stories but realize they have to sell themselves and that starts with the cover.
So to figure out an appropriate image, I've thought about what a one word message would be for each book. One word that says what is inside. I had read before that I should learn to put together a 30 word post that sells the book. That was hard. One word even harder.
One word is intended to lead to one image which might be two people, might even be an object followed by a background that tells more about the story. This isn't easy for me which surprises me as I think of myself as a person who is image oriented and very aware of symbolism. Apparently not so much as I thought.
So to start this process, I first had to put aside my personal feeling of hurt that what I did for covers, the characters I painted were not good enough. I spent a lot of hours doing that, more time thinking what kind of faces would work, but if it's seem as amateur or slapped together by a reader, none of that matters. I recognized that if that cover doesn't demean the book, I can do it. Once a writer gets past that hurdle, once they decide they have to do what they need to do, then it's all about the challenge of what would work?
I've begun this by spending hours looking through stock photos and finding reasonably priced ones that would give me a legal right to use them on my covers. Since I have made some money on my books, I can reinvest that in these images.
One advantage for me is I have a lot of my own photographs, probably more than most writers would have. I have landscapes of all sorts in the areas where my stories are set and pretty nearly any type of animal that one might want to use; but where it comes to people, I have to have permission to use even someone I shot at a distance. This gets tricky and the stock images seem a smarter way to go.
Yesterday I looked through one of the stock photo sites for male torsos (my idea being a male torso without a face doesn't detract from the image of the character in my head), and even looked for faces that might work for different characters as I decide for which books should I do this first. Women appear to be harder to find than men right now.
There are, in case you didn't know, some very very ugly male bodies out there in the male torso arena because body builders are apparently what many people want. There are also a multitude of expressions that would never fit any cover and yes, there is one site that puts together images expressly for romance book covers-- and I might say does a good job of it if you want a certain type of romance cover. Since I have seen that site, I recognize the covers on many a book.
To be totally honest, if I was younger, I'd use me for the women and could adjust to the need as well as shadow out what didn't work, but a nearly 69 year old woman just cannot pass for someone in their 20s or early 30s; so I am looking at other sources and hoping to buy what I see that would work... I hope. I thought about trying to find models to hire but that would require advertising for certain types, then if I got responses, not only paying them but getting releases. I think it would end up more expensive than stock photos where I pay a set fee to use an image 500,000 times on a book.
Humorously some have worried about that last limitation and the answer from more a experienced writer was-- if you sell that many copies, you can afford a good graphics artist to do the cover next time. Good point! As long as I don't spend too much money, I can afford to play-- and play I will be doing because after I get the images, I will have to fit them to backgrounds. It's a learning process-- and something I never could have understood without doing it myself.
And if the next book I write turns out to be about senior citizens, you'll know why...
