However, I'm assuming that as an author who's self-publishing, your budget for photography is minimal if it exists at all. This means you'll be limited in your image choices. So for this reason, I'm going to suggest we first find a high-quality (and free) image and work from there. This is a crash course, after all.
A quick Google search brought up this article that lists 14 Amazing Sites With Breathtaking Free Stock Photos. I'm sure you could find more if you wanted to, but let's keep things simple and start here.
I decided to work on finding an image for my fictional book "Broken By the Black Smoke" on Gratisography, a site with free images all taken by photographer Ryan McGuire. The site doesn't have a search feature, but there's a fairly limited number of photos, and they all look great.
More importantly, Ryan states on the site "Free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects" as well as the fact that the images are "all free of copyright restrictions". Still, if you use an image from a site like this, it's only polite to add an attribution somewhere in your book. Letting the photographer know that you used their work and sending a sample is a nice thing to do, too.
Ryan has a number of images that I thought would work well with little to no image editing - especially a couple of his black and white shots. However, since I want to show some examples of working with color, I'm going to make it harder for myself and use a color image.
What am I looking for in a book cover image? Let me think...
- one clear, bold, and fairly large central image
- a good tonal range - dark darks, light lights, and a fairly even range in between
- a unified color scheme (though that can be adjusted later)
- no identifiable structures (buildings, houses)
- no clear, identifiable faces (makes the cover too literal - unless it can be cropped out)
- nothing else that might cause legal trouble (like the photo of the hand holding a copy of "The Catcher in the Rye"
- not critical, but since almost all novels are portrait in orientation (taller than they are wide), an image of the same orientation is ideal - but if the composition works for a landscape image (wider than it is long) - or if I plan to use multiple images, a landscape-oriented image might be fine
Depth of field - where the background (and possibly the foreground) is blurred can be nice too.
I wouldn't use an image with a motion blur unless I wanted to use it that way. Blur is something you can add to an image, but you can't remove it from an image that's already blurred.
If I was working with a real book that I'd written, I'd have a lot more to go on. As it is, I have a lot of leeway with my pretend book - I can easily find an image and retrofit my title to make it work. So I'm going to take a cue from the title and limit my concept further by saying that it's a historical mystery that takes place during the Salem Witch Trials. That should make it challenging.
The obvious image choice for that concept is this one:
I may have to go back and find another image later if this doesn't work - or I may want to find a second image to somehow supplement this one. But for right now, this is the main image for my fictional work of fiction.
I've downloaded the photo (make sure not to copy the image from the screen or grab a screenshot), which has given me a generous 5472x3642 pixel image to work with. Make sure to keep a safe version of this file - we won't open the image and save it; instead, we'll create a layout, import the image, and work from there.
Next up: Creating a Cover Layout
No comments:
Post a Comment