Montana Dreaming

To find background images that are possibilities for these covers, I've (figuratively as I don't write time travel books) gone back to 2008 where I have so many great photos from Montana and Idaho. I've been copy-pasting them into a file where all the ideas for covers are being accumulated.

We've been back to most of that location since, but 2008 was the year we had the ultimate trip as we first rented a cottage where the Shields River joins the Yellowstone River. Next we got lucky on getting a cancellation and could stay at Roosevelt Lodge for two nights (right near Lamar Valley), from there luck followed us to Old Faithful Inn with a night before we headed to our final prearranged cabin rental on the Henry's Fork River in Idaho. It was the year I got some of the best photos which are proving very usable for these cover backgrounds.

On a personal level, it's disappointing that two of the interesting houses that we rented are no longer vacation rentals. There is nothing I like better than a week at a house on the edge of a good fishing river, with mountains out the backdoor. You can have your hotel with a view of the Eiffel Tower. For me, that place is on a river and at the edge or in the middle of wilderness.

Oh I like time in the cities, and those photos prove useful for some of my covers, but to find photos and locations, that bring to life where my stories are set, with my own ability to take the photos, then hike, swim, learn more about fly fishing, well that's the icing on the cake.

I wanta go back but might wait 'til the snow is gone. :)

Words and Images or is that Images and Words

My last week has found me obsessed with covers for the eBooks. I have gotten myself so sidetracked by it that I have even worked on covers for my manuscripts that are not only not on Kindle but might never be on Kindle. It is an obsession plain and simple, and I think I have realized why.

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........

Art and writing come together

I have spent more hours than I care to number looking through stock photo sites for images with the idea of creating new covers for at least some and maybe all of my eBooks. I found several beneficial sites and after going through a ton of images bought a few, but with no definite plan for how I would use them.

For this redoing, I began with Desert Inferno, which seemed right as it's the first book I put out. As I looked at it, I liked the original cover's layout. For awhile I had put up a temporary cover of a sunset, but it never seemed to really depict the book. The original face for Rachel though had never seemed quite right either.

This business of trying to visualize my characters, to put faces to them has been an addition to my writing that I never used to think I had to do. I wrote descriptions but the characters were sort of ethereal, more like dream characters. Making covers changes that.

Rachel was supposed to be the kind of woman who when she walked into a room, men and women would turn to look. She also had no personal vanity thanks to how she was raised which meant her face should have a quality of innocence. My original female face never seemed quite right. Rather than totally redoing the cover, I decided to redo her. I found an image for inspiration and using the digital brushes changed it to get Rachel.

Actually I feel a lot better about it now than I did on several levels. I feel she's not only beautiful but also looks like she's caught in that desert inferno. I could see this woman being an artist and also the kind of woman who would stand up to whatever fate dealt her.

Jake stayed the same as he is the bulwark, the strength, the kind of man people know they can count on. Finding a face that would come closer to him than this wasn't happening. I looked at a LOT of images with the potential of changing him; but in the end, this was Jake.

Finally I decided to experiment with a different background. Eventually I used one of my own photos of a desert sunset while in Tucson. When I layered Jake and Rachel into it, the whole thing came together. I might still not have something that satisfies some of the readers, but I am happier with it.

For now, this will only show up here. It takes several days to get anything changed on the Amazon page and even longer to redo a book's actual cover. Everything comes in stages.

If I am learning anything through all this, it is to be patient and keep eating away at problems until I get the final products that I feel do justice to the stories. I hope that before I get to the last three contemporaries, I'll be better at figuring it all out before they get published!

Desert Inferno's cover and all the searches through stock photos has been informative. You begin to feel cross-eyed after awhile and have to quit. Of the stories I have yet to go, I am not sure I'll change two; but will go back to look for more possibilities when my eyes un-cross. What I am trying to do with this is satisfy readers as well as myself. I can't say how readers will see this change, but I am happy with it. Of course, I was with the first one too....