Look At This!

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book covers, cover design, ebook, Theo Wayte, writing

A few months ago I posted about the problems I was having in coming up with new cover designs for my books.   I wanted something that was slightly more grown up than the originals, Something Stupid was once classified as Teenage Fiction purely because of the pastel cover and I know that my novels have always appealed to older readers as well as younger ones.  I thought about going to a professional cover designer but the ones I could afford were all American, very good but you only have to spend five minutes in an American bookshop to see how different their covers are to ours.  My books are quintessentially English and I don’t think I’d be doing them any favours by making them look American.  Of course if they were ever taken up by an American publisher who got behind them that would be different…

My husband designed several covers for me some of which were wonderful – the rubber duck with hearts all over it floating in the swimming pool was particularly memorable, as was the vortex with our cat staring out from it – but weren’t really quite the sort of thing for my type of light women’s fiction.  So then I did what I’d thought of right at the beginning and hadn’t acted on for some reason, asked my brilliantly talented friend Theo Wayte to design me a series of covers for the three books, all different but with a common style to link them together.

Theo wasn’t a book cover designer then; she is now.  See below.  She’s an artist and a calligrapher who does menus, place cards, seating plans, illustrated manuscripts, certificates, awards, labels – anything in fact you want which needs fabulous writing and the eye to know exactly what goes where.  There was a picture in Hello magazine of Michael Jackson at a huge party with one of Theo’s menus in front of him (gold writing on black card).  Oh and she also makes things, personalised wrapping paper, stamp boxes, pen jars, greeting cards, book marks…. which she takes to craft fairs and go like hot cakes.  As I said, seriously talented.

After a little bit of doubt if she was capable of doing it (ha!), Theo came up with this:

I just love it, it’s got that touch of difference I was looking for though it’s still indisputably feminine.  It might not work as a cover on a physical book when stacked up on a table but it’s really going to stand out amongst all the other drawings, pastels and photographed covers in the women’s fictions section of the Kindle store.  That’s what I need, for people to click out of interest, see that I have some genuine reviews going back several years and, who knows, they might actually buy it.

Covers, covers

Tags

book covers, cover design, e-book, writing

I’ve done the initial edit for the ebook edition of Something Stupid  – a lot of exclamation marks and qualifiers have hit the dust and I expect more will go on a second read through.  Now I’m handing it over to the copy editors (daughter and husband) to check for basic mistakes and inconsistencies.  I’m never sure whether to put the names of books and publications in italics or not, I think it’s largely a matter of personal taste now, but one thing I do know is that you’ve got to be consistent.  I’m pretty sure that the Daily Mail, which gets mentioned a surprising amount of times I realised, wavers from normal type to italics and back again on successive pages like bulrushes in a light breeze.

Now I’ve got to tackle the cover design.  The original cover designs, even if I had a right to use them which I doubt I do, are over ten years old and tastes have changed.  Something Stupid did stand out from others of its type when it was first published;

most similar books had covers in bright colours and with photographs of a face, or hands or legs.  I always thought the cover made it look like it was aimed at teenagers, it was an unabashed light read but actually appealed to a wide age range.

Then they came up with the cover for Seven Week Itch;which stood out for different reasons.  A friend told me she was embarrassed to be seen reading it on the tube.  Not surprisingly I asked for something different for Up To No Good;this was very of its time but it bugs me because my heroine had blonde hair, not dark.

It’s good fun having a free hand to create a theme for the covers of three books.  It’s also extremely alarming, because to start with I’m no expert in what makes a cover work; for instance I loved Katie fforde’s original covers such as a painting of a woman with a cup of tea done by a really good artist, they made you enjoy looking at the book as well as reading it.  Her recent covers are pastels with line drawings of women lying in the grass or racing across the page, I don’t like them anything as much, but apparently they’ve increased her sales a lot.

I’m pushing the knotty question of whether I can trust my own taste to one side for the moment and concentrating on how I’m going to get the cover designed.  Do we try and do it ourselves?  Technically it’s not that difficult if you have the right programme and are reasonably computer literate – which counts me out.  There are stock sites on the net to search for illustrations which are either free or shouldn’t cost too much.  After four days my eyes are spinning in their sockets and I’ve only found one drawing which is even a possible.

Do we pay a professional?  Even though a recent article I read about ebook publishing said it was worth the money, I’d rather not.  It gets expensive and in my opinion the examples of really good design that were used to illustrate the article were c**p.  But then that might be because I can’t recognise a good cover when it hits me in the face.

And in any case all this deliberation about who does the cover is pretty redundant when I can’t even decide what sort of cover I want; photograph, drawing, graphics, figures, landscapes, animals, cartoons, brights, pastels…  I trawl endlessly through book sites on the net looking for ideas, my eyes are spinning again, and nothing seems quite right.

It’ll get sorted eventually.  In the meantime it gives me something to bore the family with over dinner, and at least it makes a change from the rugby.

 

New Experiences 2012, number 1…

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new experiences, writers forums, writing

I’ve put a section of the book I’m currently writing up on an online writers’ forum.

So what?  I hear a resounding cry.  People do that all the time.  They might, but though I’ve participated in several online writers’ groups over the years, reading other writers’ work, making comments, chatting on the general forums, answering queries as best I could, been encouraging, kept a discrete silence, gently suggested that boning up on correct punctuation would be a good thing, ditto grammar and doing at least a  bit of research when writing a historical novel ect,  I’ve never, ever put up anything of mine for inspection.  Until now.

One of the forum's most prolific contributors

There are two main reasons.  Firstly, I keep my work in progress very close to my chest.  I don’t like discussing it with anyone until it’s finished, the closest that even my family get to knowing what it’s about is if I need help on a specific plot point and then it’s only done on a need-to-know basis.  I’m not obsessively secretive it’s just that I feel that if I started talking about what I was writing to everyone I might talk it out and lose the impetus to go on and write the thing.  Also people cannot help advising you on what they think are improvements to the plot, I’m afraid I’ve done it myself, it’s confidence sapping and you end up feeling that it’s not really your story any longer.

The other reason is that I’m not sure how helpful posting work on internet forums is for someone who is beyond the rank novice stage of need help in differentiating between there, they’re and their (you’d be amazed how many would-be writers do).  Writers are usually very kind to beginners.

Forums by their very nature attract a huge range of people trying to write in wildly different areas and a critique on a young adult novel from John who wants to be the next Lee Child may not be very helpful if he doesn’t have a clue what twelve year old girls like to read.  While he can make some useful comments on sentence structure or that this bit or other simply doesn’t make sense, his comments may well lack depth because he doesn’t know the genre.  And if you’re on the receiving end of his criticism it’s terribly difficult to distance yourself and say, ‘Well he’s got a point there but there he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

More importantly you normally only put up a small fragment of your novel up for criticism, usually somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 words.  A chapter, a scene, even a single paragraph of a novel are parts of the whole and I can’t see how you can properly judge a passage of writing out of context.  What might seen dreamily poetic gets downright boring when there’s too much of it, ditto action scenes when you aren’t allowed a break between the flash, bang, wallops, and how can you tell if a love scene is convincing if you don’t know whether the rest of the novel tends towards the Austenesque or is channelling Lynda La Plante.

Even opening chapters need to be read in context.  Initially I opened Something Stupid with my heroine being followed as she walked home from a party.  It was a cracking good scene, if I say so myself, very tight and tense.  I gave the manuscript to my husband to read and once he’d got over his unflattering surprise that I could write something readable he said flatly, ‘The first five pages don’t fit the tone of the rest of the book.’  Once I’d sulked for a couple for days I realised he was right, a real woman-in-danger scene, which this was, didn’t belong in romantic comedy.

I’m not dissing online writers’ communities, I think they’re great, writing is very lonely and it’s lovely to have others who are enthusiastic about the things that you are.  Writers also incredibly helpful about sharing information, whether it’s research help, submitting work, potential markets or a myriad of other things and the critiques can be very helpful indeed.  But just as you’d find it very hard to judge the artistic qualities of a left eyebrow if you hadn’t seen it in situ above the Mona Lisa’s left eye I still think it’s difficult to make a valid criticism of a 2,000 word passage from an 85,000 word novel.

And The Lights Went Out…

Tags

computers, writing

The screen on my writing computer died yesterday.

Simple you say, buy a new screen.  The only problem is that the computer dates back to 2001 and, even if I can find a screen that’s compatible with a venerable old warhorse, my Scottish ancestry is kicking in saying that spending a minimum of 90 euros on an accessory for a machine that is worth about 5 is madness.  So my daughter has been put on asking her geek friends to find Mum a secondhand screen duty and in the meantime progress on the book will be…zero.

The problem is I cannot write on a computer that’s connected to the internet.  I’m probably the most distractable person in the world, if I have access to the internet I’ll be stopping in mid flow and thinking, ‘Must just check that point’ instead of scribbling in a notebook for later, and while that’s reasonably legitimate even if not necessary, I’ll also be checking my emails, thinking I might just play a game of Spider Solitaire while I wait for inspiration to strike, visiting interesting blogs and no doubt, now this blog is up and running, obsessively checking how many visitors I’ve had.

My contact with the web is on the laptop downstairs in the kitchen  and when I’m going to write, I have to go through a couple of rooms, up stairs, down a passage and into my office, which also doubles as a library.  It makes the house sound huge which it isn’t but what it does mean is that even if I’m tempted to do a quick Wikipedia search it’s too much of a fag to go all the way downstairs again. Is there such a such a thing as a brief visit to Wikipedia, by the way?

The writing computer was spayed a long time ago, its modem transferred to another, now dead, machine, the games wiped off and all non-writing related files deleted.  A few photographs remain, I can’t bear to get rid of pictures of my previous dog who died three years ago or kitten photos of our now stately cat when she was still small enough to sit on only half the laptop keyboard.  There’s no telephone, only a CD player with various CD’s chosen for their ability to provide calming background music – this involved a certain amount of trial and error, everything written to Coldplay had to be deleted as my work in progress is supposed to be amusing not a long suicide note – so in theory I don’t have any distractions.

But the office is full of books and you’d be amazed at how many times you think you’d just like to familiarise yourself again with a piece of particularly good writing, half an hour later you realise you’ve read 50 pages.  Or there’s the thesaurus, I love it, I cross-reference words or sometimes just read a page for the sake of it.  And the dog, my writing companion, will turn around on her cushion and I’ll stop to talk to her for a moment. The only thing I don’t let disturb me, so I’ve been told, is the sound of my husband’s voice when he wants me to answer a question.  But then I wouldn’t know about that as of course I never hear him.

So for the meantime I’m free to muck around on the internet, play Spider Solitaire and generally do “research for background material ” aka reading anything, no matter how trashy it is, that fits in loosely with the subject of my book and of course I’m not enjoying it.  I’m prevented from writing so naturally I can’t wait to get back to my keyboard.  If this goes on for much longer frustration may well drive me to ignore my parsimony and buy a flipping new screen after all.