Saturday, February 8, 2025

Hot Chocolate & Heartache (Romance?)

Day 8 of Thingadailies:

Compared to the abject failure that was Apple Cider & Spice this is a smashing success of a romance cover, insofar as this one doesn't appear to be set in a sexless 1950s ski lodge. But I finally decided I couldn't get the text to be visible unless I started messing around with the image, and that wasn't the point of this exercise. So it remains flawed and fairly illegible.

Also, I'm not sure it really signals "romance" as much as "burn down the world", which... I mean, okay, valid, but not quite what I was going for.

Once again, it's a good thing I don't write romance.


(There's one more romance title on the list, so I'll get a third chance.)

Friday, February 7, 2025

The Mullion Window Murder (Mystery/Thriller)

Day 7 of Thingadailies:

I finally found the hidden panel with all the text effects. For some reason they renamed it to "QUICK FX". Whoever is designing their GUI needs to lay off the alcohol — none of the other windows are in all caps. It was a weird renaming decision.

Anyhow, now that I have it, nobody can stop me!


I probably would have gone with a picture of a creepy house (that being standard for the genre), but I couldn't find one with mullion windows. (Yes, I had to look up what they were.) So I went with shattered glass instead. I'm not sure it really works, but I'm mostly okay with it.

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Half Moon, Quarter Moon, Dark (Horror)

Day 6 of Thingadailies:

This cover... There were some challenges, starting with the length of the title. (Again, fake title provided by Sierra.) I don't write horror. I don't read horror. But I think this looks almost professional enough to be a real cover. Most of that's because of the picture, which is truly creepy. But some of that is thanks to the font (Boycott).



Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Apple Cider & Spice (Romance)

Day 5 of Thingadailies:

Today I had many arguments with Affinity as I tried to change the background of the spine. In some ways, Affinity is like Adobe in their user interface design — they like to hide all the relevant information in a window that isn't in the UI until you hunt it down and make it appear. I find this frustrating, but I find using Adobe frustrating as well. Might as well be frustrated for a one time cost instead of paying $22/month for it.

Anyhow, this is reading "sweet romance" because of the picture, which might be at odds with the title. Do I care? No, because the book is imaginary. If I had to market it, things might be different.

The typography is still all wrong, but that has nothing to do with Affinity and everything to do with me.



Tuesday, February 4, 2025

A Court of Artichoke & Rue (Fantasy)

Day 4 of Thingadailies:

This ended up as a muddy mess. So... not great. I couldn't figure out how to add embossing or any of those types of things to text, so I'll have to search on that at some other time. Not that embossed text would have saved this, but it might have helped.

We'll just have to agree that it's a good thing I don't write in this genre or I'd be paying someone else to make my covers...

However, I did figure out how to just export part of the paperback spread, so at least I learned something.


(Font is Freebooter Script.)

Monday, February 3, 2025

Strike Slip (Thriller)

Day 3 of Thingadailies:

Ah yes, the daily question of "how little work can I do on this and still make progress?"

Today I figured out how to clip images correctly. It took about ten seconds, because I'd noticed the "picture frame" icon the day before. But I'm still counting this as progress.

(I'm having fun writing taglines for these imaginary books.)


At some point I'll have to figure out how to set up full paperback wraps in Affinity. Maybe tomorrow...

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Fracture Planes (Thriller)

Day 2 of Thingadailies:

One of the great things about having writer friends looking for any excuse to procrastinate is that you can easily outsource your fake book titles. (Thank you, Sierra!)

I'm still finding my way in Affinity Publisher, so I decided to go with something quick tonight — a thriller. There's a bunch of stuff that's not quite right — the color palette, the tagline font, and the picture itself — but I think it's not bad for something thrown together in thirty minutes.


This uses the Bebas Neueu font, which is free to use commercially under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

I still need to figure out bounding boxes for the images, though. I could resize the image to make it fit the area, but it wasn't clipping it to the rectangle like I wanted. But that's something to worry about another day.

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Thingadailies 2025 - Book Covers!

It's February, which means it's time for Thingadailies, the month-long challenge to create a new thing every day. This year, I've decided to use the challenge to learn Affinity Publishing.

Background: I create my covers using Adobe InDesign, which is pretty standard for the industry. But Adobe sucks and you can only use InDesign with a subscription, so I'm paying $300 every year for a program I use maybe 30 minutes every month or two. (Insert rant about subscription software here. I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns.)

Meanwhile, the Affinity suite is reasonably priced and only requires one payment.

For most of the month, I'll be creating new covers for fake books.

Things I know will be an issue going in:

  1. Fonts. The one good thing about using InDesign is that Adobe has a ton of fonts licensed for commercial use. I'll either have to license those on my own or switch them.
That's a short list. So let's start by converting an existing InDesign cover to Affinity Publishing.

For reference, here is the paperback spread as it currently exists in InDesign. (Ignore the fact that the spine and back cover have all the info for the previous book in the series. I haven't updated them yet.)


First hurdle — Affinity Publisher doesn't open InDesign's indd files.

I have to open the file in InDesign and export in idml format. Not a big deal, but it means I can't drop my Adobe subscription until I go back and export everything.

Anyhow, I exported the cover in the right format and Affinity Publisher was able to open it.

Not bad, though there are a few obvious problems, mostly to do with replacement fonts not fitting in their boxes. Also, for some reason it decided to hide the back cover text, though I was able to get it to show up again later.

Let's fix the fonts

The original file is using "Collector Comic" for the title font. I found a font that is free for commercial use called Komika that has a similar feel. (I'm not wild about what it's doing with the T, but I'll ignore that for now.)

So now the cover looks like this:

vs the original:

It may not be obvious here, but the colors are slightly different. The only difference I can find in the metadata is that the original has the ColorSync profile set to "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" and the new one has "Generic RGB Profile".

That might not matter much because it has to get converted to the CMYK colorspace for printing anyhow, but it bugs me a little.

Updated problem list

  1. Fonts (This will be an ongoing thing)
  2. Colors aren't as vibrant
That's enough for day 1.