Cover Art (Day 13)

 Making a paperback cover involves adding a spine and back cover. Eventually it all needs to end up in one pdf that looks like you're holding the back cover in your left hand, the right cover in your right hand, and letting the pages of the book hang down.

Which is something like this...

Obviously it wouldn't have a pink line around it, but I exported with a white page background so I had to improvise.

I always find the spine a challenge. The width depends on the number of pages and the paper type. It also depends on the vendor, because cream paper from Amazon's print on demand service is a different weight than cream paper from IngramSpark's print on demand. But really I find it a challenge because I'm useless with InDesign, so every time I change the width it messes up other things. I'm sure I'll figure it out someday...

Ignoring the fact that I'll have to go back and change the width of the spine after I finish writing, editing, and formatting the book, this is what the first pass looks like.

(Click to make it bigger)

Up to now, all my titles have been pretty short. This one is really long. I'd love to split it into two rows on the spine, but this book isn't epic fantasy — the spine is probably going to have to get smaller than what's shown here already.

For the image on the back, I just took the background of the image I'm using on the front. I'm okay with how that looks, but I may play around with it a bit. The important thing is that the text on top can be read.

I made up a price to put on there. Theoretically, the back cover should have the price. The barcode will automatically be placed on the lower right corner of the back cover when it's printed. But the chance of this ending up in physical bookstores is really low, so I'll probably remove the price so I don't have to redo the cover if printing costs change.

So that's the paperback spread. I'll play around with it more in the next few days, but that's pretty close to being done.