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Sources for cover art

Telcontar

Staff
Moderator
Your stuff looks pretty good to me! I'll be keeping you in mind too.

Anyway, digital art I also consider hand drawn, for the most part. I was just making a distinction between an artist - who can create images from scratch - and a graphic designer who does not necessarily do that. A lot of graphic artists I know only use pre-existing art and arrange it within a new image. Takes some skill as well, but I prefer the former.
 

JazzTD

Dreamer
Ah, yeah, lots of artists enjoy using stock pieces in their art. Some for reference others to edit. I don't though, it makes me feel like I didn't actually create anything, but that's just me, I have my own stock to use anyway.

To each their own. :)
 

boboratory

Minstrel
Another possibility that occurs to me is to find something on e.g. Deviantart and ask the artist if you can license it. If you find something that works well for a story, it could be a good way to get good, non-photographic art for relatively cheap.

As a publisher, I have used Benjamin's method, I have used Deviant art to ask for cover artists, and I have met many interesting people and found art a reasonable prices...
 
All three of those may have taken only a few hours of graphic manipulation and a little bit of back-and-forth with the artist, but they all show rather a lot of skill. You also need rights on the dagger. Can I ask, how much would something like that cost?

I actually created it is a 3-d modling program - if you look cafefully you can see the individual pieces - and then manipulated in photoshop. But to the question at hand...royalty free stock photgraphy can be as cheap as $10 or as much as seeral thousand. Most times $59 budget will get you what you need. I used to run an advertising studio and we bought stock photogrpahy by the CD - where you'd get 300 images for one price of like $120 but I'm sure they are much cheaper nowadays.
 
I ended up buying a couple of stock photos, editing them together, and doing some color/effect manipulation to make the cover for my short story. You can see the result here:

demons.jpg
 

Telcontar

Staff
Moderator
A beautiful picture! Where exactly did you buy these photos, and how much did they run you, if I may ask?
 
They were both from dreamstime.com. I searched for "walled city" and went through four or five pages, picking out the ones that most matched what I was going for (ominous creepy foreground in front of a walled city). (The little dude standing on the rock was just drawn in by hand.)

The way dreamstime (and, I gather, most stock photo sites) work is that you buy "credits." Each photo costs credits; different resolutions cost different amounts. So you might get a 1500x2000 pic for 7 credits, a 2000x2500 for 8 credits, etc.

You can buy credits in packs (in which case, at dreamstime anyway, they cost $0.93 - $1.25 each depending on how many you buy at once -- the more you buy, the more you save, etc.). I spent $24.99 on a pack of 25 credits, and used up 17 credits to buy the two pictures. So, it ran me about $17. I'm sure I could have gotten away with something for less, but I liked these and the end result came out decent, so I think it was worth it. :)

I've uploaded the story to Amazon for publishing; fingers crossed, it'll be available for sale later today :D
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
I ended up buying a couple of stock photos, editing them together, and doing some color/effect manipulation to make the cover for my short story. You can see the result here:

View attachment 341

The font looks good but the yellow outline doesn't, I don't think. But you can try some fun things with fonts and colors, like copying the text and overlaying the text with itself. "Demons" in one color placed almost ontop of "Demons" in another color, kind of thing. I've gotten some pretty good effects that way, but everything I've done in graphics is self-taught and has taken me hours upon hours, so I'm sure there's probably a better way.

Best of luck with it on Amazon.
 
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Nice selections Benjamin, I would suggest you play around with your typography a bit though. You might even consider extending a sky above the walled city and put the title in there as it would be less busy behind the book's title and that would make it stand out more.
 
Yeah, I'd thought about that... probably wouldn't have been too hard to do, but I was tired and had been fiddling with it for an hour and was getting impatient ;-)
 
Don't rush it or work on it when you are tired. Even do a few different variations with different fonts and colors than ask some people their opinions. It's too important an aspect to rush through.
 
I used Deviantart for the cover of Princess of Prophecy. Cover.jpg
I found a unicorn I wanted to use and the artist was easy to work with. She sees it as a mutually beneficial endeavor (as I do).
I've done a similar thing on my web site, Alexander Knight It has rotating artwork that I've gotten permission from each artist to use. I had a few artists say no, but the majority that responded allowed me to use their work.
Also, I've read a couple of articles that say that the biggest mistake epublished authors make is using bad cover art. They say it's the cover art that gets people to look further and when the art looks cheap the reader assumes the whole book is of a similar quality.
 
I thought it would be fun to post the evolution of my book cover, as I just did a new one today.

That's the cool thing about self-publishing, you can change the cover on a whim :) My orders ship right from the plant to the customer, so I don't bulk-order, and each book is a little different. I find something I missed, or a comma I forgot, and then... Pop! New Edition :D

Original Final.jpg

Early Design.jpg

Early Design 2.jpg

bookcovernew2.jpg
 
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