Technical Steps for a Book Cover

Here are the step by step technical details on how I designed these three medieval romance book covers:

First, you need to choose a background image. It shouldn't be complicated. It is just a background. It should set the tone for your story. The "rule of 3s" apply - you want each main component of the photo to take up about a third of the image. It works well for the top third to be sky, so there is a nice, generic background for your title to rest against. Remember, it is CRITICAL that your title be easy to read. Simple font, simple contrast, so that people can spot it at a glance.

I took the above photo in England in 2005, while visiting with a friend Peter May. He and I went around touring all the DaVinci Code locations - plus Stonehenge and other barrows - for research I was doing.

OK, next I needed a heroine. Luckily, I own a number of hand-made medieval dresses, and a few swords. I really do love medieval life :) So it was simple enough for me to dress up in one of these. My boyfriend took a photo of me from behind in front of a plain white curtain. I didn't want my face in the image, because I wanted the reader to be able to imagine whatever face they wanted for their heroine. We all have had the experience where we love a book, then go to see the movie and think the characters don't look "like they should"!

Since the character background was all white, it was easy enough to "erase" that from the image, and superimpose the image of just me over the image of the landscape.

Next, the title and author. Both need to have clear lettering and clear contrast. I did use a slightly medieval looking script, to give it some sense of the book's theme, but I chose one that is still very easy to read. In PhotoShop it is easy to give them a drop shadow and slight bevel. To be specific, I went with a 131 degree lighting angle. A drop shadow size 21, distance 21, opacity 75. An outer glow of size 21, opacity 75. Finally a bevel of size 21, direction up.

Then it was just a matter of adding the subtitle of "a medieval romance" - to make it super clear to the person who picks up the book just what they are getting.

Finally, I added a "canvas" texture to the image, so that it didn't look like a photo. Now it looked like a painting done on canvas. I tried different degrees of "canvas" on each cover. The issue is that it doesn't necessarily look great on a thumbnail - which is what internet buyers are based on. However, it looks great on the actual cover, so people would be happy once they got it. It's one of those balancing acts.

What I finally settled on for canvas - which I'm going to do for all of my books - begins with lighting. I went with top right light which is a standard lighting effect, it's how humans tend to imagine light from the sky falling. I set relief (depth of the canvas) to 10 and scaling (how big the canvas squares are) to 150. Make sure you hide the text layers before you texturize your image - you don't want your letters to be textured :) You want your letters to be crisp and easy to read.

Voila! It's done!

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