Cover Presentation, All About That Look!

The old adage goes that you can't judge a good book by its cover.  This may be true, but it sure didn't stop Me from buying several dogs just because they had great artwork on the cover over the years.  Hell, I still do it today.  Plus I will confess that I've kept them all around because I love the artwork.

For My own part it's My hope that it is My stories that readers find endearing.  However from the above experience the fact that the cover plays an important part of the sell isn't lost on Me.  For the independent writer the position is difficult.  Without having money to spend on the resources I've learned that you have to be creative.  The three initial covers I came up with were done quickly, and not with much practice with the photo program I used to generate them.  I revised the cover for Heather's Journey: The Sound Of her MASTER'S VOICE as soon as I had a chance to sit and think of exactly how I wanted to tweek it.

I pretty much had no idea what I was doing to begin with.  However as I was redoing the SOHMV cover I recalled the covers from comic books that I had collected over the years.  From around the late 60's or early 70's until the late 90's Marvel Comics, and later DC, started placing the image of one or more of the main characters in the top left corner beside the title of the comic.  This is what influenced Me to put My Skeleton Belaton icon in the same place on all My reworked covers so far with House Of Master Vyle Presents beside it.  Call it an homage to what helped to get Me here, because comic collecting helped further inspire My desire to create My own fictional universe.  (Give Me a few years to get more out there and you'll see the connections between stories.)

Of course I've been playing around for the past couple of weeks and I can tell you that not every cover idea follows this design, but it's the one that I've got out there so far.  I've had to be somewhat creative with limited resources.  So far I've doctored up some of My old pictures, took new pictures of places and objects, learned to crop, color and skew bits of My own personal pictures, My own horrible artwork, and in the future I plan on purchasing some pictures from royalty free stock photo sites where they're reasonably priced.

This week I updated the covers for Bunny Holes:

And St. Patrick's Day Scrumpin':

As you can see I did My best to make them both a little more visually arresting and professional looking.  I went back to a lot of those old Zebra Horror covers to get an idea about adding just a bit of extra wording to the covers.  Overall I'm pretty satisfied with My work and as I am sure you can see they're both a little more eye catching that the original covers.

In addition to giving them new covers I also put both stories on Lulu now as well.  I should have their links all up and posted in the stories section soon.

So tell Me what you think.  Do they look better than they did?  I actually received My first compliment on the Bunny Holes cover within five minutes of it being posted.  Yeah, I know.  I'm trying to sell a book based on the cover, however I've also done My best to put something entertaining and unique beyond that cover as well.




Master Vyle