A great cover shot?

26.3.11

So now I've finally decided to go it alone and publish my book(s) on amazon for kindle, I have to come up with a suitable cover image.
As Raven is aimed at the YA market, it needs to appeal to teens. I recently came across a blog post about how bad some YA covers are... the author mentioned the fact that so many are trying to emulate the Twilight covers, others are far too pink and girly, some are just way too cheesy for their own good and so on.
So what to choose for my own book? I've looked online to see if I could buy a suitable image, and to be honest, I'm not overly impressed by those in my price bracket (ahem... in other words I don't have a lot of dosh to spend!)
So, on the suggestion of my lovely biker husband, we are going to create the image ourselves. Should be fun (or not!).
His first suggestion, 'how about my Ducati', he said with a cheeky grin.
'Darling, my book is about a girl whose parents disappear. She has to move to Canada. She discovers she isn't who she thinks she is. Add to that, a magical world of changelings, werewolves, vampires and the like... where on earth does a Ducati motorbike feature in that?' I replied.
Point taken, we decided that we need to drive up the mountain on a cloudy day and get a great snap of an eerie looking forest... except we also need a teenage girl to pose in the shot. We haven't got any kids and don't know anyone with a teenage daughter, so currently we've got our thinking caps on!

3 comments :

  1. Hi,

    Ever heard of super-impose?

    Take a background image, find/locate another image that fits desired efffect: object select, copy/paste object to background, add special effects. It's possible to do all this with software such as Fireworks or PaintShop Pro! ;)

    best
    F

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looking forward to seeing your cover soon. Good luck x

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  3. Hi Francine!
    Thanks for your suggestion... we have thought about doing that and we are lucky enough to have a friend who is a whizz with Photoshop. We might end up doing that in the end!
    Best wishes
    Suzy

    ReplyDelete

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