Posts by accordingtohoyt

Closing the Door

There is going to be a brief hiatus in the cover series for the next two weeks because I’ll be out of the country and can’t get access to my art computer, but I planned to have a post out today, I did.

Except we woke up to insurance confusion, bank confusion and airplane travel plans confusion.  This not counting “paperwork for ceremony in Portugal confusion” for number 1 son’s religious wedding. Read more

Covering History

Making covers for historical books is difficult for many different reasons.  At its base is the same problem as writing history: people will rate it as wrong if it doesn’t match their preconceptions, even if their preconceptions are wrong.  (There never was, and there never will be a writer of historical anything that is besieged by people who say they’re completely wrong, just making up stuff and pig-ignorant. And most of the time those people should turn those slurs on themselves.)

In sum, the problem of historical covers as of historical novels is bridging the gap between times and cultures.  But for covers that’s only the beginning. Read more

Cozy Up

I meant to do this yesterday, but I came down with some terrible bug.  So, sorry to be horribly late and perhaps a little less detailed than usual. As in, I completely forgot to save the art in progression.  Which is just as well or I’d be posting this at two pm. Most of them are fairly self explanatory.

Doing covers for cozies is probably the easiest thing ever, because almost all sites, including free sites like Pixabay have cartoony figures. It’s also one of the most difficult things ever, because you can’t have the same figure/cat/whatever every book, since few artists have series of 20 or 30 pictures of the same cat or person, in cartoon.

Read more

Seeing Your Writing

Sorry, today I’m not doing my installment of how to do covers.  We’re traveling out of town come Thursday, not back till Monday, and it’s one of those events where there will be pictures, so I need to be decently dressed.  We start with this part of how writers see — or don’t see — themselves. I normally work alone in my tiny office, overlooking 400 acres of trees and nothing, so the only things that go by are wild turkeys and eagles, neither of which gives a hang about what I wear. I tend to dress by the engineer method: are all relevant portions covered?

Now, face with being in public with a bunch of strangers, in the aftermath of losing 40 some pounds, I’m having to hem, pull in, etc. a bunch of clothes. Which is part of the work for today.  Writing is kind of the same way. Read more

You’ve Got To Give A Little

So I can imagine you guys looking at last week’s post and going “okay, so the second one when you were awake is sort of acceptable, but it’s still a lot of work, and what if we don’t have your familiarity with a graphics program?”

Well, fear not.  Or at least don’t fear a lot.  There’s still options for free or for money (for money if you want something more specific.)  And we’re not talking hundreds of dollars.  More like $15.  Yeah, I know that’s sometimes too much. Which is why I started out doing this, for friends who wanted to try indie but hadn’t even that. Read more

Resources for Covers

For reasons known only to the psychiatrist I don’t have, I decided to do a seminar on covers. You can find the first post here, and the second here.

Today we’re going to cover one of the topics that stop most people: where do I find the art?

I’ve seen covers made with pictures the author took or drew which are often stunningly inappropriate to the genre and book. And I’ve heard people say that they’d have to pay two thousand dollars for covers.  This is ridiculous.  There are many, many sources of free and cheap images on line. Read more