The images on a cover have the potential of telling the story before the reader opens the book. Images can reveal the emotions that the writer hopes the words inside also do.
There are a lot of ways to do that. I have seen books where there are a ton of small images on the covers and those with one key symbol. I am interested in both options. As a commenter here said earlier, if a person is a known writer, they can sell books based on their name. If they are not, they better use what readers of their genre are expecting to find.
Once I reconciled myself to redoing covers and buying stock photos, it led to two types of covers. The easiest is simply using a photo or combination of photos. So far, I have done three of those. Some have required republishing so future readers get the cover that Amazon shows on the ad.
And yes, I sold out; but I have to admit the guy does look like I visualized my hero in both cases. Too bad there aren't more 'types' putting out sites like his. With more writers creating their own covers, it is helpful to have someone creating the costuming and images to help the vision become real-- at least as real as any photo.
For my covers, I set stock images either onto a bit of a digitized backdrop (from my own photos) or just the straight photo. My favorites are those with no faces as that leaves the face open to imagination.
Then came the covers where I opted to do digital paintings for the characters. IF I could have found more photos of my protagonists, I'd have used them. It's not easy finding a photo of a character I have imagined but have never seen. The digital paintings were a mix of photos I had bought as well as some I had seen as inspiration but where I changed them to fit the character.
I learned a few things. For instance I had one nice image I created of a man who I thought was a bit young for one of my characters but thought I could alter it to appear older. When I told my husband I couldn't make a boy into a man, he laughed saying he had heard that elsewhere. When I tried to work with the heroine, she ended up looking like the youth's mother.
The thing is although my hero was young, this was not a coming of age story. The images have to stay true to the kind of story. This is the kind of thing I really never paid attention to before. I have never bought a book based on a cover. I am not sure others do either but apparently at least some do decide whether to look beyond the cover based on it. Now what kind of image works, that I am still not sure about. I will keep trying to learn. I can do a lot more this way than I ever imagined but it has led to some failures along the way.
The boy, who simply was never going to work, I dropped alongside a waterfall which came off a photograph I took in Idaho in 2008. Who knows maybe someday I will do a coming of age story although it's unlikely to be of a boy... I wonder how hard it'd be to turn a boy into a girl......
I have three of the new covers alongside here but not yet republished for the books. That takes time with Amazon........
