Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing an unscripted episode about lessons learned working with a cover designer.

Over the last year, we’ve done a wide range of topics — from writing about disabilities to writing with empathy —that took a lot of energy and preparation. We’ve also been doing this podcast for almost 5 years and as we celebrate our 250th episode this last month we felt it would be fun to do a series of episodes getting back to our roots of how this first began — through unplanned conversations about life, books, and the writing craft. So, for right now we’re continuing to see where our conversations take us, without planning in advance what we’ll talk about.

In this conversation, we talk about a lot of different aspects involved in cover design for those in self publishing. Things like:

• Developing a vocabulary for what details you are looking for and what ones need changes — especially around lighting, color, texture, alignment and font

• Reviewing other covers in your genre to ensure the cover you get reflects not only your story, but also looks like it fits within the genre

• Working to get an understanding where your tolerance levels are (for the cost, giving up certain areas of control, and the back and forth of requesting changes to ensure you get what you want) to decide what method for developing your cover makes the most sense

• If you are paying for something, ensure you know what you are getting — like the designers quality of work to ensure it worth the cost or a commercial license for illustrations to make sure you can use them how you want

• When something goes wrong with the proof, taking actions to isolate where the error is happening in the process (between the template and the printer)

• Figuring out what changes are worth asking for and which ones you’re ok with accepting as is

Towards the end of this discussion, we talk about a third option to choosing either designing a cover yourself or hiring a designer — that there is a middle ground where you can use elements that have been designed by others and that you purchase which would allow you to piece together the cover on your own and be able to learn through iteration and make small adjustments as you need them.

We hope you enjoy this episode and the more improvisational format of this series and that some of this connects with your own journey!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Fable talks about the cover design process for a gothic novel that she (under a pen name) and a co-auther are in the process of preparing for self publication.

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)