Cover art: Chalice and Knives

I have absolutely no graphic design training; what little I know about designing covers has been picked up along the way, mostly by trial and error. And I will never claim that I'm actually any good at it.

That said, here's what four six hours in the GIMP and fifteen bucks' worth of stock art will get you:

So, as evident, this is the cover for my next short story, Chalice and Knives, which I'll be publishing in the next couple of days.

The best thing about e-publishing

I'm in the process of finalizing my next short story, Chalice and Knives, but in the meantime I took another look at the cover for The Demons of Lashtë. Someone had pointed out that the title text overlaps part of the background, and is a little hard to read as a result.

Well, I took the cover art and revised it. And now I think it looks significantly better:

Here's what changed:

• I redid the gold drop shadow on the title to make it more consistent and a little denser.
• I redid the clouds effect above the city to make it more uniform, as well as a little darker and more evil-looking.
• I redid the red drop shadow on my name, to make it stand out more.
• I changed the aspect ratio to 1.6:1, which is the recommended ratio (recommended by Amazon, anyway, for purposes of displaying). Most books on Kindle do seem to use this ratio for their cover art.

The best thing about e-publishing? Once I had finalized the cover and rebuilt the file, I was able to update it on Amazon in about two minutes. Well, it'll take 12-48 hours for it to actually show up on Amazon, but my work is done: now all I have to do is wait, and the new, slightly prettier version will be available for all and sundry.

Unfortunately, I don't think Amazon automatically updates a purchased copy of the story with the new file, so if you've already purchased it, I don't know if there's any way to see the changes. But it does mean I'm not stuck with the first version of the art.

Cover art for The Demons of Lashtë

So I finished writing The Demons of Lashtë, and my next big step was creating cover art. The consensus for short stories these days, when self-publishing, is to find appropriate stock photography and then modify it to make it look professional and appropriate. Or at least as much as one is capable of doing. I have virtually nothing in the way of artistic ability.

To that end, I present the cover art for The Demons of Lashtë:

This was created by combining two separate stock photos from Dreamstime (total cost: about $15), manipulating the colors on both, drawing in a little human figure with a halo, adding some text, and using a GIMP plugin called GIMPressionist to give it a painted feeling. The text is in a free font called Fairy Dust, and has several layers of drop shadow underneath to make it readable. The whole process took maybe two hours, plus a half hour or so of browsing through stock photos to find ones that I liked. (To the degree that the cover looks decent, all credit is due to my wife.)

The story should be published on Amazon for Kindle in the next couple of days.