I’m reading a book about a boy. It’s a new paperback – I picked it up in Waterstones as part of a buy-one-get-one-half-price deal. I got up to page 6 and was tempted to throw the book across the room.

Why? Because the title says boy, the blurb says little boy and the cover shows a picture of a young (white Caucasian) boy. With all the references, I think it’s safe to assume that the cover is meant to depict the boy in question. But page 6, and the protagonist is pondering the ethnicity of the boy in question as he is so dark-skinned.

So why is our cover model white? Dark haired yes, and not white white. But clearly of Caucasian origin. Do the publishers think the book will sell more copies if the cover shows a white person? Does it matter? I think it does, yes. I read a lot of articles campaigning for more culturally-diverse fiction and I think it’s important – especially for children – to be able to read about characters ‘like’ themselves, to identify with them and maybe aspire to be like them. I’m not far enough into this book yet to know whether said boy’s ethnic origins are important to the story, but since it’s important enough to mention and important enough to wonder about, it ought to be important enough to find a child for the cover that at least looks the part.

I’m not saying that all book covers should replicate the story in minute detail. God knows I’ve seen enough bad covers where the author has insisted on having a dragon, a sword, a red-headed female warrior, a magical artefact and a wizard with stars on his cape (because that’s what the story is about, don’t you know?) – and the result is cluttered, amateur and frankly silly. A cover is meant to convey genre, give you a hint of the style of the book and entice you to read the blurb and then the opening paragraph. But since the cover of my book is just a boy, why on earth couldn’t it be a dark-skinned boy?

And now I've just looked on Amazon and it's a title-stuffer: A gripping psychological thriller full of twists you won't see coming ... No really, I will. Trust me on that one.

Sigh.

Anatomy of a Cover (or an idiot trying to use photoshop...)

I've been lucky so far. A talented friend did the cover for my short story collection and a professional cover designer did the jacket for my novel (with input from the wonderful Al Guthrie whose help was much appreciated).

I have a crime short story I wrote for a competition. I rather like it and there doesn't seem to be a huge market for shorts, so I thought it might be time to put a few single stories on kindle to generate some more interest in the novel. It turns out that the writing is the easy bit!

version 1

First off, I need an image. No problem - there are lots on google, aren't there? Well there are millions to search through and many have no known owners that I can find. A lot are tied down by copyright and creative commons licensing and it's such a minefield, I don't know where to start. I don't want to pay monthly fees for image downloads and I'm not very good at sifting through them all to find what I want.

So given that my short story is set in Liverpool, I thought I'd go and take my own photos. Hubby has a posh digital SLR and happens to work near Pier Head, so I sent him off on a mission to take me lots of photos of the Liver Birds, Pier Head, the Mersey Ferry and terminal etc. He came back with half a dozen Liver Birds.

Next I need software. I have an old copy of Photoshop that I bought some time ago (you can buy previous versions - mine is CS3 - quite cheaply when new versions are released). So I chucked the best photo in, cropped it a bit, resized it and added a title and author. I even managed to sample the colour of the Liver Bird and use that as the text colour. The result was version 1 - but the Liver Bird is so small, it will be invisible at thumbnail size (need to remember that anything shown on Amazon or used as a signature in forum posts etc will be *really* small, so the cover needs to be sharp with a lot of contrast and big type).

version 2

So I tried again. This time I cropped more of the image so the Liver Bird is bigger. This is an improvement, I think, although you don't get a sense of the sheer size of the building. Now you can clearly see the colour of the text matches the Liver Bird. I'm not sure what else I want to add to this image yet - might go and take some more photos of the ferry and I'm not sure where on earth I can find a royalty-free image of a rocket-propelled grenade (rpg) from as unfortunately I don't know anyone who can assist me there! Version 1 would be better to add secondary images to, but then the whole thing might look too complicated.

version 3

Version 3 and I've cropped the image so that the Liver Bird dominates the space. A different look again.

So what's next? Well I'm not fussed on the font. It needs to be something that's obviously not romancy-chick-lit, all the more so as the title itself doesn't say "crime" (it's a song title for those of you who don't know). I've exhausted the fonts within photoshop so I need to go hunt around the net for inspiration (and fonts seem as complicated as images...)

Sort the font, maybe add a couple of smaller images if I can work out how to do it without it looking tackily amateur. Format the story and upload it and I'm away!