The Long Road Part Four - Worth a Thousand Words: Cover Design

THE LONG ROAD TO SELF-PUBLICATION

“Five Ferries took 39 years to write & 16 months for everything else.”

Part 4 – Worth 1,000 Words: Cover Design

After nearly 40 years of effort, I published Five Ferries, my first novel. The writing took up most of this time, but in the last year and a half I entered the world of self-publication, and this is a story in itself 

After my manuscript was edited and formatted, I focused on the cover. I didn’t expect bookstores to stock my book, but I thought the cover would be important to online sales—and it was something that would stare at me from my bookshelf for the rest of my life. 

In the course of distributing draft manuscripts through the years, I had thrown together covers by inserting the title over photographs from my trip (see <fiveferries.com/photos>). I continued doing this when I sent versions to my editor. She dismissed all these attempts and advised me to use a qualified graphics person.  

I enlisted Lorenzo Contessa, an graphic artist friend, who created a hitchhiker image and placed it in a mock cover design. I went back to him several times to remove detail from the drawing and correct other details, such as removing the heels on what should be running shoes. I also pulled out the old backpack and had my wife shoot photographs to show the correct proportions (returning to my aim of making the novel accurate, if not precisely true). I would later have to ask the artist for a black & white version of the hitchhiker image for my editor to use in designing the title page and for use on the website, and it took several attempts to transmit an image with sufficient dpi (or ppi) for this purpose. (I still can’t explain how dots-per-inch translates to pixels-per-inch.) Lorenzo graciously gave me the image, in return for a couple of meals but, unable to shake my legal training, I had him sign a one-line assignment of the image copyright. 

The artist finally suggested I turn the project over to his friend who did graphic designs for covers. I had several conversations with the graphics person and agreed on a price for her services. However, when I sent a two-page agreement to make our deal clear (again, note the legal career), she responded that she intended to retain the copyright in her cover design and only license me the right to use it in North America. In addition, she wanted to be free to use the design any way she wanted—beyond on her website or in a portfolio—and she would defend a claim that she had copied someone’s else’s design only to the extent of what I paid for the work. We parted ways.

I was exploring how to post the job at the design schools in New York when I happened upon the website <99design.com>. This site asks for a “brief” setting forth the job and thoughts about the design and then runs a design contest in which, in a first phase, designers submit sketches of ideas, in a second phase the client chooses six of these designs and works with the designers to revise them, and then the client chooses one design and owns it. The cost was about two-thirds of what I was to pay my original designer.

Overall I received 121 designs for the cover from about 40 designers. These designs took the hitchhiker image in directions I hadn’t imagined. In the seven days of Stage One (extended three days at my request), I rated the submissions and gave comments. Some initial designs showed the hitchhiker in a tropical setting with palm trees or a huge setting sun, or on a mountain peak or a beach, none of which were appropriate. Others reversed the image so the protagonist was hitchhiking with his left hand—which would work only where cars drive on the left and so not for most of Europe. Some designers revised their submissions to reflect my comments.

I chose six designers for Stage Two and continued commenting on the submissions. I soon trimmed the potential designs to four and asked to see the full set of front, back and spine designs for each.

At this point I was stuck—again. I liked all four designs and wished someone else would decide for me. However, there was no one else to make this decision, so I turned again to crowd sourcing. I sent the designs to my beta readers, my family and various friends. Guided by the responses, I narrowed the choices to three, and started carrying printouts to pubs and dinner parties and anywhere else I could corner people for their views. I asked everyone as to apply two tests: 1) wandering a bookstore, would the cover make you pick up the book to read the back? and 2) sitting at one end of a subway car, would you recognize the cover of the book someone was reading at the other end of the car? I got 20 thoughtful responses, but they were almost evenly split among the three choices. Two things ultimately decided the question. A couple of those choosing the winning design hated all the other choices, and another friend said that, while the other choices were more dramatic, they did not suggest “serious literature.” While it might be presumptuous to claim literary merit in a self-published novel, I decided this was my privilege as an author and thus made my choice. It was somehow apropos that the winning designer lived and worked in Dublin.

I had to deal with the design site to finalize my choice and release the print-ready designs. Early in the process I had reviewed the contracts provided by the site and found them inconsistent. I offered to fix the site’s documents, and the response was I could use my own agreement to transfer the copyright. However, to conclude the contest I was required to sign the contract posted on the site, so I had my designer sign an additional contract that explicitly superseded the form posted on the site.

At this point I was able to put the designer in direct contact with my editor, who was creating the title page that would reference the cover image and use the same font as the cover. She forwarded the two printers’ cover requirements and the spine dimensions to the designer.

Even after I chose the winning design, I pestered my designer (why should he get off easier than all the other poor souls who helped me?) to show me the cover using various color schemes. Printing these and staring at them convinced me he had chosen the best colors to start. Once I confirmed this, my editor was able to send a complete manuscript and cover to the printer to print a copy for the proofreader.

At the eleventh hour, my editor convinced me we needed to add three pages of fluff (half-title pages and blank pages) at the beginning and end of the book. This required (I was told) a reconfiguration of the spine design and additional work by my cover designer.  Unfortunately, the designer lived in Dublin and I could only contact him by email, and once he had delivered his final design he proved quite hard to pin down. When everything else was finished I had to rely upon my editor to download the design program and do the final changes herself.

See Part 5 – Novel Marketing 

Cover Design Resource:

Design Contest:  https://99designs.com