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This is a hell of a thread. I've been trying to catch up with it between my day jobs and my writing. I've gotten too much advice and resources to give props individually, but thanks anyway to all the thread regulars! I'm jammed with my own writing at the moment. I'm a teacher (  ) and I work a second job to supplement my income. But between the two jobs and raising a baby, I don't have as much time to write as I would like. At the pace I'm able to write (just a few hours per week, at best), it's going to be a long time before I finish this novel. So I have an idea that I figured may have come up before ITT and I missed it: has anyone tried using Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding site) as a way to pre-sell digital copies of a book? I have a lot of ways to network with folks who are interested in the genre I'm writing, so I have a strong foundation for getting the word out about a KS campaign. If I offer Amazon digital copies to backers of a certain level (say, $5), then they get a digital copy and I get an influx of money in advance to free up my need for extra work. In a perfect world, I wouldn't need the money in advance, but getting it before the whole book is done will free me up from having to take so many per diem shifts at my second job that are getting in the way of having enough time to write. It's that catch-22 of time that has me jammed, but I'm thinking Kickstarter might be one way out of it (if it works).Has anyone ITT done this, or something like this? Or am I completely off base?
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Aug 10, 2015 17:11
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One would assume that a kickstarter campaign would work a lot better if you had some works out to show to people. "I'm going to write an awesome book and for 100 bux you get a minor character named after you!" isn't going to inspire a lot of people unless you are already a name in the genre.
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Aug 10, 2015 17:41
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I know someone who did the Kickstarter thing unsuccessfully despite having some amount of name recognition in her corner of the internet. I was honestly somewhat surprised it didn't work out.
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Aug 10, 2015 17:51
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Don't do a kickstarter. Write, finish, and publish something. If what you're writing is financially viable, it will eventually make money. If it's not, Kickstarter will not change anything. Kickstarter for a book from an author with no books is never going to do well.
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Aug 10, 2015 17:54
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I've done cover-art kickstarters twice, and both times it worked very well. But I already had the books written and I was just fund-raising for the art, so there was basically no chance I wouldn't complete the project. And the latest was for the 6th book in the series. That said, most people didn't come from my mailing list, and most of them took the "get all my books" rewards. I would not attempt a kickstarter with no fanbase and no back library.
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Aug 10, 2015 23:40
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Sounds good. Welp, that's why I'm here. Thanks for the advice, everyone! Plan B is to figure out some ways to squeeze more hours out of the week to have more dedicated blocks of time to write.
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Aug 11, 2015 13:27
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Anyone else seeing an embarassingly long turn around time on their work lately? The last two stories I submitted to Amazon are still both 'In Review': one's been there two days and the other is coming up on its FOURTH day. Are they taking a vacation or am I about to be hit with something bad? Edit: yep, the magic of "complain about it on SA" works. Both stories are now publishing as of four hours later. Popular Human fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 16:23
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Sorry about the double post, but is there a decent guide out there to tax stuff for self-pubbing that you guys would recommend? There isn't anything about it in the OP that I could find, and I'm actually starting to make a decent enough amount of money self-pubbing that I need to worry about things like that.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:51
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The best tax guide is "get a tax professional"
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Aug 11, 2015 21:37
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So, uh, between a really weak Malaysian Ringgit and some personal financial problems, I might have some trouble springing for a proper cover. Any recommendations for someone wanting to make a cover on the cheap, besides 'Photoshop your own'?
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Aug 12, 2015 16:12
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What genre?
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Aug 12, 2015 16:36
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angel opportunity posted:What genre? Science fiction/fantasy. I know I might be asking a bit much here 
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Aug 12, 2015 16:54
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What's ''cheap?''
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Aug 12, 2015 17:00
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Do you have some kind of art skill or eye for aesthetics? If you do, you can probably sink some time in to messing around in Photoshop with stock images. It's MUCH harder for sci-fi/fantasy to find quality stock images, but it should be possible still. There are a lot of nice looking minimalist covers in scifi/fantasy in addition to the SPACESHIP IN FRONT OF PLANET or BADASS SWORD GUY type covers that you typically think of. If you have no money and very little skill, the best you can hope to pull off is just finding a stock image that already looks really nice on its own and slapping text onto it. While that sounds easy, getting text/fonts to look good is really hard if you don't know what you're doing. The way the fonts look with the cover as a whole is such a huge factor in whether the cover actually looks good or not. ...HOLY poo poo THIS IS OUT! http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Cixin-Liu-ebook/dp/B00R13OYU6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439395303&sr=1-1 Okay, let me catch my contain my excitement at seeing this suddenly and point to the font. Color choice is hugely important and can be very hard to do correctly. Sticking to one color can help limit loving up, because as soon as you start doing color combos there's so much more room to make mistakes. On this cover you have a warm title color (the orange) which looks great on all the cool purples and dark magenta of the cover image. White is pretty loving safe and can help break away from all the text on your cover looking super boring. On a lot of my covers I put my pen name in white. It stands out really well, looks clean, etc. That sort-of transparent textured look on the title font is really big right now in a lot of genres. It looks cool and poo poo, and with tweaking you could probably get something similar to happen on your own if you can work Photoshop. Finally, where to actually put text can be super hard. You have to think of this while you are choosing a stock image. Some images that look really good have no suitable negative space to throw text onto. This cover has no human faces on it, but if your stock image has faces or some clearly defined spaceship or animal, you really don't want to put the text so it obscures these kinds of things. The quote on the earth looks fine because you don't need to see every pixel of the earth to know it's the earth, whereas if you put text like that over someone's face, it just looks bad. Keeping the text basically centered is easiest. As soon as you start messing around with text that is slanted or having poo poo on the left but not the right, you run into asymmetrical feel or "unweighted" look. When you finish a draft, zoom out so it's about 150x100, around 200 pixels on one side. You want to see what the Amazon thumbnail will look like. How it looks in thumbnail view is probably MORE important than how it looks full size. Don't let something that looks bad in thumbnail but good at full size stay on your cover, it's not worth it no matter how attached you are. Finally, look at the finished product and ask yourself if it looks like a bad self-pub cover. If it does, wait until you have money for a real cover to publish. Don't waste all the time you spent writing publishing your hard work behind a bad cover that will kill sales. I'm pasting below what I mean by "bad covers." You can see the text is usually the main giveaway that it's a "bad self pub" cover.  This stock image is actually not bad, but hot pink clashes with hot red. You can barely read the text, and text all over her face looks awful. This image actually leaves no room for text, so it's NOT actually a good image for a cover even though it's an interesting looking photo. The slanted text is done randomly and just looks bad. If you don't know what you're doing with it, don't slant the text.  The cover image itself mostly sucks, but focus mostly on how the black text doesn't work at all with the color scheme of the image. Black doesn't really "go with everything" on covers. I get the feeling he wanted to use white, but since there was too much white on the image, he used black. He probably couldn't get any color to look good since that white/pink/orange/yellow already clashes on its own. Putting the author name directly below the title like that looks dumb. Usually you want them spread out so the "weight" doesn't feel all clumped into one spot. His font choice is okay, kind of, but the text should be bigger in general. I feel he chose this image (or drew it) and then realized it was hard to put the text on it anywhere, and was forced to keep it in the middle. Can you imagine the title being on the top with that color rift?  Literally no eye for fonts or design or anything here. Dude got pictures of Earth and the moon, picked a font at random that looked unobtrusive, and used white because the background was black. I feel like someone who is really really good at typesetting type stuff could MAYBE make this cover image look good, but I doubt it. The symmetry and weight is weird, and the image is just not very interesting. Tactical zooming or cropping might work, and some other tricks, but this is just really ugly. Would you ever look at this thumbnail and have ANY interest in clicking to see what the book is about?
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Aug 12, 2015 17:19
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angel opportunity posted:
AUGHHHH. The perfect centering of the title leaving just the corner R and nothing else just barely overlapping the image is so hideous. Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 00:41
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Simplicity is really the key for your cover. Make it fit thematically with what's inside, and don't get too crazy exploring color combinations, and you should be good. I find especially with self-pub stuff, people trying to say so much with their cover, instead of very little. You have to entice the reader into opening your book, not spill all its secrets at a glance. Also a good rule to stick to: no characters. It takes away so much from description and characterization inside the work if you just paste someone on the cover. I find a lot of self-pubs do this and it baffles me because I've never seen it work well. Just to throw out an example, and people can throw critiques my way as well, this is what I'm using for my current sci-fi serial:  simple, not too much, and the red really makes it stand out in the sea of other covers that may appear on the page. Canadian Surf Club fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 22:26
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Canadian Surf Club posted:
I dig it. You can also read my recent guide: https://litreactor.com/columns/diy-book-covers-for-the-self-publishing
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Aug 13, 2015 22:35
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Canadian Surf Club posted:Simplicity is really the key for your cover. Make it fit thematically with what's inside, and don't get too crazy exploring color combinations, and you should be good. I find especially with self-pub stuff, people trying to say so much with their cover, instead of very little. You have to entice the reader into opening your book, not spill all its secrets at a glance. Also a good rule to stick to: no characters. It takes away so much from description and characterization inside the work if you just paste someone on the cover. I find a lot of self-pubs do this and it baffles me because I've never seen it work well. Nice, good , great example!
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Aug 13, 2015 22:43
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Thanks for all the tips, guys, especially this:Canadian Surf Club posted:Also a good rule to stick to: no characters. It takes away so much from description and characterization inside the work if you just paste someone on the cover. Because I was actually thinking about doing something like this  I thought having some people on the front would make the thing more atrtractive. Would it be all right if I post a mockup cover and blurb sometime this weekend, after I've had some time to work on it?
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Aug 13, 2015 23:15
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Canadian Surf Club posted:Also a good rule to stick to: no characters.
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Aug 14, 2015 00:19
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So is self-publishing dead now that Amazon pays for page views instead of borrows?
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Aug 14, 2015 01:29
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No.
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Aug 14, 2015 01:42
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We'll know in two days!
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Aug 14, 2015 02:56
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moana posted:We'll know in two days! yyeah I'm cautiously optimistic but this is the real answer
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Aug 14, 2015 03:18
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Canadian Surf Club posted:Just to throw out an example, and people can throw critiques my way as well, this is what I'm using for my current sci-fi serial: Choice of font, padding, spacing, image size and clean lines are all important in getting it right. Don't attempt it unless you're willing to learn how to do it well. Example of bad: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11446608/hilariously-bad-Kindle-book-covers.html?image=8
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Aug 14, 2015 08:43
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moana posted:I think this is an awful rule for most genres. Human interest sells. Agreed. A more specific rule would be "don't try to recreate scenes from your book, even if they involve people." The feel is more important than the scene. Also, most genres are heavy on cover-people because they do sell. Consider the rule of faces for covers. You are naturally drawn to people looking at you, and this even includes things that aren't people but in some way resemble people looking at you. This translates to book covers and your eyes will be drawn straight to someone looking at you (or appearing to look at you) on a book cover. Does anyone still have the link to the article explaining it? I can't find it anymore, and it does a way better and more thorough job of demonstrating the impact than I can in this post. quote:yyeah I'm cautiously optimistic but this is the real answer I wish I shared your optimism, but here's hoping! 
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Aug 14, 2015 16:24
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I commission my covers, because I like having original art, but 20 minutes with a stock photo and I can do some reasonable stuff. If I had to give any advice, and I really don't think I'm qualified, you need an image editor which can handle layers. Also a healthy stock of Blambot fonts so you're not stuck with Times New Roman or anything with nebulous licensing issues. The ones I used for that image (a header for a play-by-post game thread I'm in) were Jack Lantern, Dracu-Frankenwolf, and Trash Cinema to give it a horror/pulp vibe. Honestly, it should be fine with any free font that you can use without worry, and which fits the genre of your work. But Blambot has a lot of very clear and well-designed fonts that are made for titles specifically, rather than general use. Try to use contrast to good effect. Don't try to go too dark or too light overall, because a lot of kindles/e-readers are black-and-white and the cover can end up looking a lot worse when run through that. Use colours that elicit the right feelings for your genre piece. As a sort of occulty-horror thing, my example uses a lot of sickly green tinted with yellow, with stronger colours on the title outlined in some stark (in comparison) off-white. But for something like romance (or super-romance) you want warm colours. Use Paletton and/or Adobe Color to find good palettes to use. Then use layers over the top of your stock photos that adjust or recolour them to work better. There's a bunch of tricks you can learn, like using blurred copies of the original image to create a bloom effect, but a lot of the time it's trial and error tweaking things 1% at a time and seeing what it looks like.
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Aug 14, 2015 17:30
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Fuego Fish posted:
nooooooooooooooooo
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Aug 14, 2015 18:46
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Example of bad: Someone stole the pen name I was going to use, Scoots McCoy!
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Aug 14, 2015 19:25
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ravenkult posted:nooooooooooooooooo Hey, whatever works for super-romance 
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Aug 14, 2015 19:37
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moana posted:I think this is an awful rule for most genres. Human interest sells. I say that mainly because it's really hard to get right. I'm not against having any kind of figures on the cover, but something like a face close-up or model stand-in, or god forbid a 3d posed model, comes off as amateurish and will get easily lost in the crowd.
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Aug 15, 2015 02:17
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Man, this is what I get for not opening the thread before I got started on the covers  That being said though, I would like a critical eye on the mockups I have already made; they all use the same stock photo (what can i say, I like it), and all I did was change the fonts between them. I wish I could say I did more, but to be honest I don't know what more I could do. I didn't want to get all complex and poo poo because I know I'd just have messed something up.Anyway, here are the rough covers. I personally like the third best, but I'll wait for you guys' opinions first. If it helps, the original stock image I used is here:    And my blurb: quote:On the edges of the galactic empire known as the Concord, an elf named Shara Torellon finds herself hobbled by a ramshackle ship and crippled finances. Desperate, she takes up a seemingly harmless offer from Concord Intelligence, only to find herself in far more trouble than even her most paranoid fantasies anticipated. An eldritch horror from before time seeks to avenge itself on the mortal races, using lost technologies that would tear the very fabric of reality apart. In its presence, the faithful, loving and patriotic are twisted into villains, while traitors and demons find themselves on the side of righteousness. In the end, though Shara is anything but a warrior, she and her ragtag crew find themselves the only ones who stand in the way of a galactic Armageddon. What do you guys think? Part of me thinks it's a little too 'IN A WORLD GONE MAD', but that might just be me.
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Aug 15, 2015 05:22
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I'm fairly font ignorant but I feel like what you need is a bolder sans serif font with a dark drop shadow.
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Aug 15, 2015 06:01
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I'm not a cover expert but I think all three of your examples look pretty amateur. II do like the title though. TThe blurb is pretty good but I'd throw some paragraph breaks in there. The last sentence is actually pretty bad, I thought you had missed a comma and had to reread it to get the meaning. BBook sounds amazing, put a link in the thread wwhen it's aavailable and I'll buy it.
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Aug 15, 2015 06:57
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If you have a spare $45, you might have a look at some of Go On, Write's premade sci-fi covers. Some of them might fit your premise pretty well, and they all look more polished than yours. If you don't have a spare $45 (I know not everybody does), then I do think your stock photo is pretty attention-getting, and IMO the typography is the biggest problem. Look at the bestsellers in your genre and see what the fonts look like. If you want to go with a simple sans-serif font, I think this one (linked by AO earlier) and this one are two good examples. (God I love that last cover. Not a bestseller, I just really like it.) Blue Scream fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Aug 15, 2015 |
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Aug 15, 2015 14:53
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July Report is up. KENPC = $0.00578. I wonder how much money they added...
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Aug 15, 2015 15:22
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Bezos bringing back the halfpenny. See what other secrets you can seduce out of him. Report back.
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Aug 15, 2015 15:27
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Well, I haven't taken a COMPLETE dive since the change. I'm down about 50% but it's still better than what I was expecting.
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Aug 15, 2015 16:00
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:July Report is up. KENPC = $0.00578. I wonder how much money they added... Yep... number was absolutely dead on what we expected based on the early calculations.
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Aug 15, 2015 16:28
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Oh boy! A whole farthing.
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Aug 15, 2015 16:40
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