https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/806538779107196928
So this is a brief process description for those of you who may be interested in how this kind of thing is done (or may yourself wind up doing it some time and wouldn’t mind some pointers).
Here’s the problem: an old cover (in this case, the original goes back to 2021/2022) that needs to be refreshed.
The cover in question looks like this, as viewed in my preferred paint program (Corel Photo-Paint).
Simply as a side issue: if I had the energy right now, and felt it was necessary, I’d redesign the cover completely in one of the newer, flatter styles. But (a) I don’t think that’s absolutely necessary at the moment, and (b) I don’t have the energy.
Background, however. I was looking over the cover’s basic design the other day and thinking, “Okay, sure, this is a restatement of a scene in the second half of the book. But it’s static, and doesn’t even hint at the action that happens in both halves. There’s nothing here to get anyone to buy it who doesn’t know anything about the Middle Kingdoms series: no sense that something might be about to happen. So let’s at least hint at it. It doesn’t have to be a scene that actually happens. Let’s just imply that both these people are magic-users and fighters (on the same side), and have some kind of relationship to each other.”
So I thought about that for a while, and decided that a back-to-back fighting pose might work. There were already-made images that I could steal borrow the figures from and plug them into the basic background set.
So I did that, and ran some renders to see how well that would work.
…I don’t feel it necessary to bore anybody with the ten or twelve partial renders that preceded this one, changing the weapon angles, the weapons themselves (in Skádhwë’s case) and the colors of the characters’ clothes. Both of them are wearing variants of their house colors—Dusty in Brightwood white with highlights in the Phoenix-and-flames colors, ‘Berend in the tai-Enraesi brown. (Her house’s armorial lioncelle is hidden under her mail and so isn’t an issue.)
So by and large this works okay. Now, though, come the pre-press cover positioning issues.
When you self-pub a book to the 'Zon, your first step is to upload the formatted manuscript. Once that’s done, you’re offered the choice of letting the KDP platform create a cover for you (which I SO much do not recommend, for a veritable host of reasons) or upload your own cover art. First, though, you need to make sure the art’s the right size. The 'Zon looks at the format you want to publish in (trade paperback, etc) and the length of the book—which determines the thickness of the spine—and then creates a template for the cover art. It looks like this.
The dotted lines mark either folds (on either side of the spine) or cuts (at the edges). The pink stripes mark zones where those cuts and folds may happen. Your job—once you’ve added the template to your cover file as a layer—then becomes to fit your art and your lettering over and into this template, being careful not to put anything vital where it will (or may) be cut, or bled into a place where it doesn’t belong.
Here’s how that looks with just the art, turned partially transparent to confirm how it behaves in terms of alignment.
…And here’s how it looks with the original cover’s lettering in place, and the background art wiggled around a little.
…There’s still some work to be done here. The spine needs to have the Middle Kingdoms logo “branding” added to it at the top of the spine, as that appears on the other re-covered print paperbacks. I’ll also need to move the camera angle just a little itsy bit to allow the tower and banner in the background to display to better advantage. (They weren’t dead centered on the initial cover, and there’s no reason for them to be that way on this cover: the centering on Herewiss and Segnbora counts for more.)
So the semifinal version of the cover now looks like this:
…While that looks okay, it’s not beyond possibility that I might re-render the background art just one more time to push Dusty and 'Berend a little teensy bit to the left, just to make something or other in my hindbrain happy. But I’m almost there. 🙂
…So now I can let this rest for a bit, and go to town to buy some bird peanuts. :)
https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/806538779107196928
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