On choosing a cover page
Designing is easier than choosing
It starts getting hot in November. The Australian summer technically goes from December - February but really, everyone knows November is a summer month down here.
Empty beaches start filling up, air-conditioning units start clocking in for their yearly overtime shifts, jeans start disappearing in favour of shorts, Christmas beetles start crawling along verandas in the evening, Christmas songs start caterwauling through the shopping centre aisles.
And I try to decide what cover to use for my next book.
This will be the fourth collection of writing I have published in the past four years. Each time summer rolls around in November, I will have typed up all the various poems and / or short stories from my little notepads, scribbled full throughout the year. I will have collated and edited them, along with any that were already shared elsewhere (such as Vocal or even just posted on Facebook for friends and family) and I will have chosen the ones to make the final cut. Before I can publish the collection on Amazon, however, there is always the final step: the cover.
I tend to use my own photos for cover images, and I enjoy the design process. Trying to answer which photo goes best with that year's writing - working out if there is perhaps any overarching theme that I should match with an image, or whether I should simply choose a striking photo that will grab attention.
What I don't particularly enjoy, however, is choosing which design to ultimately use. I am terrible at it. (I'm also terrible at choosing titles, but that is another matter).
This year, I thought perhaps the Vocal community might help.
I have narrowed it down to the final two designs, and if anyone has any opinion on which I should use, feel more than free to let me know in the comments. They will be attached below for your perusal. In the interests of full disclosure, I can't promise to abide by majority rules - at the last minute my gut might tell me one or the other, or I might even wake up one morning, rush to the laptop and create an all new design that simply insisted upon itself. Still though, any help anyone wants to give will certainly be considered carefully.
Cheers,
Roderick.
About the Creator
Roderick Makim
Read one too many adventure stories as a child and decided I'd make that my life.
I grew up on a cattle station in the Australian Outback and decided to spend the rest of my life seeing the rest of the world.
For more: www.roderickmakim.com
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Comments (1)
Hi Roderick! I like both covers, but I subjectively find the second one to be more eye-catching. I think mostly because of the larger white-on-black print.