Cover Done Right…
From An Old Awful Cover to New…
Kris and I, in WMG Publishing, have at last count over 1,200 titles. In the early days I did the covers and they were done right and for sales. Then we hired a group of employees that we trusted and did not watch what they were doing at times due to numbers of factors, not the least of which was we had to move to Vegas for health and hospital reasons. (This was before Steph.)
This group was clearly set out to sabotage me and Kris and the entire company by doing covers that would not sell. I caught a few of them before they got out, but not all by far. (The “previous administration” as we call them did other things to really damage WMG and me and Kris, but for now only talking about covers.)
So people listen to me talk about covers and then look at some WMG books that goes against what I am saying. Yup, a bunch of them, and going to take me and Kris years to catch and fix them all. Years. 1,200 titles you know…
So here is an example of just one I fixed yesterday. It will be a free-fiction story Kris will put up in a week or so.
When Kris showed me the previous cover, my first reaction was “Ughhh, that’s awful.” And I am right, it is awful. So I said I would redo it and brand it and Kris completely agreed.
So as I looked at the old cover in InDesign and pulled out the sabotage pieces like Kris’s tiny name and the title being the largest element, I got down to the art. The art actually fit the story really well, but the person who did that first cover in our previous administration had made the character figure small and unimportant, thus making the reader feel the character is small and not important. (More sabotage of sales of the story.)
So I took the art and made the character much, much larger, used one of Kris’s brands of her name at the top, tucked the title at the same size near the bottom beside the character, and put the tag blurb up where it belonged near Kris’s name.
The difference between a cover that would never sell the story and one that will. Here they are side-by-side, the piece of crap cover first and then the one I did.
