Fail Early

I confess to being a chronic do-it-yourselfer.

I think this passion to learn how to do everything, and then do it, maps wat back to my childhood, when my parents told me I could do anything I wanted if I just worked hard enough at it. Naturally, I believed them.

As a result, I literally try everything, no matter how complicated or difficult.

In the early 2000s, while I was working as a web designer, my manager asked for some custom web applications. I researched the required work extensively and soon found myself in the business of database design, web development, OS X server administration and security. For a few years, I ran my own e-zine, Ultraverse E-Zine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, (now defunct, but still to be found in the Wayback Machine).

I also designed my own wedding dress, starting from a muslin pattern. It took weeks to perfect and looked fabulous. Re-grouting the tile around the garden tub? Piece of cake. Landscape design, painting, resetting paver stones, propagating literally any kind of plant – I’ve done all that and more. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I probably would have cut and set my own granite garden path instead of hiring a contractor.

Sometimes DIY is a good way to save money, and other times it’s just fun to get down in the details and own the entire effort. So as you can imagine, when I decided to SELF-publish, I also decided to design my own cover. I had a history in UX, web design and photography. Why not?

Before I answer that question, let me take you on my design journey.

First, I worked with my daughter, Olivia, to come up with a concept. What should be on this cover? Among our top choices were the amulet and the Blackwoods.

We spent an entire 3-day weekend laboring over our ideas, searching for useful art that had a Creative Commons license and appropriate fonts. It was grueling and satisfying work.

By the end of it, here’s what we had:

I’m guessing that you are less than impressed. But at the end of three days of this design process, I actually felt pretty good about my results, and I started showing it around to my family. They were (as family always are) very excited and complimentary.

But then, when I actually put the image up on my desktop beside one of Amazon’s top 100 fantasy novel listings, I realized I’d never make a sale with my own covers. My work wasn’t even in the same universe.

After I gave up and hired a professional designer, Peter Thorpe (final result shown at left), I also learned there were a lot of other problems with my designs. For one thing, they’re the wrong size. For another, I can’t actually use most of the fonts I chose, because of licensing. And I had somehow entirely overlooked the need for a second format that included a spine and back cover for the paperback.

More research could have helped me through some of these things, but no amount of research is going to make me into a professional cover designer.

Lesson 1 in Self Publishing: Hire a Professional Cover Designer

Creative Commons image by Grieslightnin on Pixabay.