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Designing Book Covers – without chips.

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED – READ ON TO FIND OUT WHY.

I am pretty excited today because I am planning to republish my novel, ‘Piggy Monk Square.’  

This means that at long last I now have the opportunity to change the cover.

HOLDING A BOOK DESIGN CONTEST

I only heard about the contest method a couple of days ago. I was listening to a podcast and I heard a discussion about 99designs. 

This is a service for writers where they facilitate you to hold a contest to find the best design for your book.

You pay an upfront fee to the site and submit your brief. Then designers submit their preliminary ideas for covers, you comment on them, provide constructive feedback, encourage the ones with potential and eliminate those with none. At the end of the process you choose the winning cover and that designer gets the fee.

Piggy-Monk-Square-CoverI know very little about designing book covers and have been struggling with getting a cover for a while.

Piggy Monk Square was traditionally published in the UK by Tindal Street Press and I had no say in the choice of cover – see left.

I ‘quite liked it’ at the time but I have to admit the cover didn’t jump out at me and I hated what they did with the spine – they added chips!

I felt that chips was a stereotypical image of Liverpool and insulting.

I suggested this to them but the chips stayed and there was nothing I could do about it.

Mind you, I managed to keep the Liver Birds from landing – either inside, or outside the book so that was something.

Now, the situation is very different. All the rights have reverted to me and I had the choice of finding another publisher or throwing myself to the wolves and trying out self-publishing.

TAKING RISKS

I decided life is too short not to take a few risks, and so here I am. I am not a complete novice as I have already self-published a series of children’s stories.

These were originally broadcast on RTE Radio One here in Ireland and when those rights returned to me I adapted them as eBooks.

Those stories were shorter, however, and so the venture didn’t seem as risky as it does with Piggy Monk Square. I am entering this process with equal amounts of excitement and trepidation.

I’ll be honest, I knew what I didn’t want in the cover – chips! But I didn’t have a whole lot of ideas about what I did want.

I tried getting some initial sketches/ideas from various design sources but none of them ‘jumped out at me’ either.

PRELIMINARY SKETCHES.

book cover of Piggy Monk Square by Grace Jolliffe on a post about designing book coversWhat did jump out at me was the idea of holding a contest. That way I could see lots of ideas and lots of designs without bankrupting myself paying for tons of preliminary sketches etc.

At the moment I am a couple of days into the contest. I have a couple of weeks to decide and to be honest I am over the moon with the results. The process suits me well, as it giving me much to think about as well as showing me options I had never considered.

What’s also great about this is that you can invite people to watch your contest and they can learn alongside you and share their opinions.

NO CHIPS FOR PIGGY

At the moment there are a few images emerging that are jumping out. One, in particular, is really jumping high.

But still, I can’t decide just yet. I will watch and wait, there are still designs coming in, so it is way too early to be sure. However, one thing I am really sure about is that the cover will not have a single chip!

Please – wish me luck!

Grace

P.S. Click here to read more about my inspiration about Piggy Monk Square. 

P.P.S. Click here to read reviews.


UPDATE

I am just updating this post – some years later to say that I was very pleased with my new cover and Piggy Monk Square even managed to get a best-seller tag on Amazon – my first one!

Book cover of Piggy Monk Square by Grace Jolliffe - illustrating an article about Designing Book Covers

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