self-publishing diaries | cover reveal
Having topped off the manuscript a couple weeks back, I usually let it marinate a little and return with fresh eyes a few weeks, possibly months later. This one I am set to go back into before the end of September since October is looking to be a bear of different things competing for my attention,. If I want to have a final version of the galleys wrapped before November, this seems like a workable timeline. Once it's as good as I want it, I usually give it over to a couple other sets of eyes for seeing things I missed, but usually these are just small tweaks--less developmental and more proofing. Ideally I have the most final version as I began layout, but that right now is a problem for Decemberish me.
Because I am enamored of all things visual, I have had the cover at least partially designed for weeks now Like with GRANATA, I wanted to save the collaged for the interior, but I wanted something that had a similar look and feel on cover. (In that case, you have a landscape image that I used in a couple collages and a portion of a collaged oil portrait, both of which wrap to the back. Because I wanted this new book (and any others I write in the future) to feel like a new one in a similar series, I decided to use similar elements in this one, changing my landscape to a craggy seascape and my modified portrait to a younger girl with some digital additions. Instead of the text straight across the divide, I went with it slightly skewed across. I will likely go with a dark brown with light lettering for the spine.
As time goes on, I get better at formatting covers to upload, and have even been using the POD printer for a couple of dgp series chapbooks that are more complex and don't work in the standard size of my printer (square-ish, longer lines, much like this project.) I hope to do more in the coming year since it gives us much better images in the interior than my printer can create which are worth the extra expense and higher cover price when I can actually swing it.
While I've used a number of different software and things to build covers over the years of publishing my own work and that of others (including using Word for years to avoid paying for Adobe products, I've settled in the past few years with the paid version of Canva, which is much more user friendly than something like photoshop and much less expensive (plus it has a pretty decent internal library of graphic accents, stock images, and video clips there when I need them.) I've also learned better over time on how to use some its tricks like the background remover and magic grab. You also have control over changing the colors of things in an image, which I use often in designing covers. I do pretty much all of my content creation with Canva as well, like poetry postcards, reels, and other graphics. It's definitely worth paying monthly to get access to more of its goodies. Make the design, download as an image file or pdf, and you're on your way...
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