Hello Again!
After a long break, I'm ready to do some major overhauls of the manuscripts I finished last year. We begin today with a complete redesign of the cover for "The Princess of the Peas."
I've struggled with the design of this cover for a long time. Since I'm not a huge fan of using real models on my self-designed covers, it has been hard to find a "fit" for this one. The themes of the story combined with the odd nature of the title only add to the difficulty.
My covers are almost all self-designed or designed by my friend
Adelyn Sterling based on original design concepts of my own. For photos, I like
Pixabay as a great source for free images that can be used commercially without attribution. The fonts come mostly from
FontSquirrel, another great resource. You have to be a little more aware of what their licenses require, but I always give credit to everyone in my front matter anyway.
Here is my first iteration of the "Princess" cover. You'll notice I began with a modern foodie photo focusing mainly on the "peas" part of the title with a font that attempted to evoke the royalty of the word "princess" and the curly nature of pea plant vines. Believe it or not, this cover was designed entirely in Microsoft Word using
this tutorial I found.
There are things I still like about this cover. The colors, for one thing... the green really pops, and I love that particular shade of grey in the background. The lines are lovely too. It is a beautiful photo, but the text placements and colors leave the viewer in no doubt that I am an amateur. :P Still, I loved the photo so much that I stuck with it through two or three different edits. By now I had purchased an Adobe Photoshop subscription and had designed a real book cover with Adelyn's help. That cover is the one I used for "Glass Roses" when it came out in print.
Here are my next redesign attempts:
Clearly I've learned a thing or two about font sizing, not to mention more streamlined ways to highlight the text and make it legible. ;) I think a part of me will always love the idea of this design for its colors and clean lines. Still, as the story evolved, I felt there was a need for a change of some kind.
This is where I got a little experimental... and since I was only experimenting for myself, I decided that grabbing any image I thought might work from the Internet was okay. Obviously this is bad practice for any graphic design project, but since my Wattpad and blog are not monetized in any way, I figured it was fine for a placeholder project. Here is the cover I eventually settled on:
Well... it's definitely different! You can see that I kept the green color, but darkened it significantly. This is one of only a few covers on which I have a physical model in the photo (something I'm still not sure I like doing... except for
this cover I slapped together on
Canva for my most recent project... I like this one). The original font choice is still present, but I'm leaning a little more heavily into the "princess" idea with the more ornate details. Notice that I placed the words "a modern retelling" about where a logo or company name would be printed on the chef's uniform. The little border between text and image is meant to resemble parsley... have I got you convinced?
This is honestly a bit cringe-inducing to me, especially after looking at the lovely, clean lines of the earlier image I was using. Those cringes and my decision to start tearing the manuscript to shreds with much-needed edits paved the way for my most recent cover overhaul.
I began with almost no idea what to try that I hadn't tried already. So I started skipping around through the original draft, reading snippets here and there until I suddenly had a spark of inspiration... why not make the cover look like an old cookbook? Off to Google I went to search for cover designs used on antique French cookbooks. Eventually
I found one that looked the way I had been imagining it and set to work. There is probably more I could do, but for now I am happy with how it has turned out.
Here are the two covers, the inspiration piece on the left, and the new design on the right:
So... what do you think?? Leave me a comment below and let me know if you like the new design, or if you think I should keep trying.
Happy Reading!
My post was featured on August 17th, and it will remain part of the Block Party "book" on Kelly's profile for as long as she is willing to host it. After much thought, I finally decided to share a scene from an old story idea as a sneak peek chapter. When I say old, I'm talking old. This scene has been kicking around in the guts of my hard drive for years. I could never get an actual, functional story to coalesce around it. Everything was too nebulous and clunky. However, when I finally sat down to produce something for my Party post, I pulled the scene out and writer things started happening in my brain. I'm now in the middle of outlining the whole story, which will probably be at least two books long (though I'm shooting for three). Isn't it amazing what time and patience and working on other things will do for an old idea? I'm also feeling much more comfortable with the process of ditching things that I've hoped to include, and that alone has helped this old story immensely. The scene itself is polished in a way I never could have done all those years ago when I first wrote it. You should check it out and let me know what you think. :)