Judging by the cover . . .

Are you having a great week? I am but then I'm still excited from the launch of The Only in paperback (and am likely to be for a while yet!). I've had so many comments about how lovely the cover is and what a great job the artist did that I thought it would be cool to interview her to find out how she does it. 

Let me introduce you to the lovely Lisa Bonar :

Hi, Lisa, it's so great to have you on here 

First of all, thanks so much for having me on your blog, Karen! This is quite the honor!

So let me ask you, do you read much or is it the artwork on a book that you love?

Well, I do love the artwork, but yeah, I’m a reader. I read on my computer, my Kindle, my phone, and heck…I have even been known to read actual hard copies of books, ya know, like old school?

A girl after my own heart! What type of books/genre do you like?

Here’s where I suffer from a bit of schizophrenia. I like a bunch of different genres. My favorite books are Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility, The Prisoner of Azkaban, Kilmeny of the Orchard by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Midnight by Dean Koontz. (See? Schizophrenia!)

I’ve also read and enjoyed several books by indie authors. A couple of standouts are 2012: The Final Revelation by Lisa Flaus,, and The Only, by…oh wait…you know who. Seriously, I really liked your book, Karen!

I'm very happy that you liked it! :) How did you get into designing book covers? 

Well, funny story. I have, myself, authored two books, and had such a great experience (this is sarcasm here, folks) getting the first cover done that I was inspired.  Actually, I used a designer who was recommended to me by my publisher, and she just wasn’t getting what I wanted. I had to all but get into a cyber-brawl with her, (she was in Germany, I was in the States, so it wasn’t practical for me to punch her in person), in order to get the cover I was looking for. I had some experience with Photoshop from doing ads and graphics for past business ventures, so when it was time for book #2, I opted to do my own cover, which turned out to be a far less painful experience.

That’s when I realized that it might be helpful for me to offer my services to other independent authors, who may not have a graphic design background, or a budget of hundreds of publishing house dollars to sink into cover art. I offer most front cover designs for $35 USD and full-cover (front, spine, and back) designs for $60.

And amazing designs you do, too. And I have to say that working with you has been brilliant, totally pain-free and the cover has turned out so well, I'm as proud of it as if I'd designed it! So tell me what elements make for a great cover?

I think the elements that make a great cover are the same elements that make a great advertisement. After all, your cover is the glowing neon billboard for your book; it’s what makes people want to check it out in the first place, so it has to command attention. Whether it’s an “in your face” color scheme, a vivid and bold image, or a line of text that inspires curiosity, something has got to make readers pick the darned thing up, already.

You also may have noticed that I like to use eyes a lot. Eyes are great attention grabbers. Also, contrasting colors and shades tend to make things pop as well.

How do you decide on what to put in and, perhaps more importantly, what to leave out?

Most of all, I want to make sure I am creating designs that are what the author wants. Most writers have at least a basic idea of what they want on their cover. They just need someone with the technical or artistic experience to put their vision together.

That said, even though design is technically an “art”, there are some hard, fast rules. One of which is simplicity. Once I’ve finished a design, I go back and turn each element off, one at a time. This shows me whether I have something that just isn’t needed.  It’s like editing a book. If a word or phrase isn’t necessary, no matter how in love with it we may be, it has to go.

That's really interesting - I never thought about it like that before. Can you talk a little about the process of designing?

It’s funny, but the process of designing parallels the process of writing in a lot of ways. It starts with an idea that gets developed and expounded upon. You try a bunch of different ways to put things together; some stick, some don’t. In the end, you edit, and tweak, and fine-tune your little heart out, and hopefully you end up with something you love.

What do you think about the saying 'never judge a book by its cover'?

Hehehe, is that a fair question for a cover designer to answer? ;) I think you CAN judge a book by its cover—or at least a little. The mood of the book is often reflected in the cover, or it should be. If an author (or publisher) is creative with their cover, I’ve found that the book is likely to be creative as well. Does a boring cover equal a boring book? Not always, but unfortunately I may never know. I rarely even pick up the books with boring covers. Even when I’m shopping for a classic on Amazon, if one copy has cover art and another (of the EXACT same book, mind you) has a “text only” cover, I’m more inclined to buy the copy with the cover art. Maybe it’s just me, but I kinda doubt it. Covers are important!!!!! End rant.

When you choose a book to read, as an artist, is it the cover that you go by, at least initially rather than say the title?

Well, after reading the above you’d certainly think so. However, a title can be a powerful “design” all by itself. For example, say that two book covers have nothing on them but the title in red on a black background. One is called, “Understanding Mathematical Equations, by Prof. Charles Schwarz” and the other is called “The Black Fallen”. Which would more likely capture your curiosity? Sometimes the title is the design.

And here's one for fun - if you were a super hero what would be your special power? 

Hmmm, I’d want it to be something totally random, like the ability to turn ordinary objects into chocolate, or the gift of always knowing the color of my enemy’s underwear. Gotta keep those super villains on their toes!

Ha, ha, I'd love the ultimate power of chocolate! Thanks so much, Lisa. I'm really looking forward to working with you on the next part of Maya's story :)

If you want to know more about Lisa, you can check out her blog here http://www.iabookcovers.blogspot.com where she showcases some of the other fabulous covers she's designed or email her at statementshome@yahoo.com

Which one are you?

Are you a diehard physical book person who wouldn't dream of reading anything on an e-reader, ever? Or do you love the ease and convenience of an e-reader and can't be doing with carting hard copies of books around now you don't have to? I must confess I thought I was that in the first category until my husband gave me a Kindle for Christmas a few years ago. My first experience with it abroad really sold it to me - I'd downloaded the first of The Hunger Games and it was so good, I rushed up to the wifi area in reception to download books 2 and 3 to finish while we were away!  The down side for me with my Kindle is that I'm sadly very clumsy when reading in the bath, so I haven't quite reconciled myself to not be reading it while having a good soak! Note to self to investigate waterproof covers…or the new waterproof Kobo! But I love physical books too - yes, I'm one of those who smells new books and find it virtually impossible to get rid of the books I've read which I'll never read again and which are taking up all the space on my bookcases. It seems, like many people, I guess, I'm in the middle. So imagine how excited I am to be able to announce that The Only is now available in paperback from amazon! And a crackingly lovely paperback it is too.  Ta dah!! The artist has done a wonderful job – isn't it pretty?! There's something really special about holding a physical copy of your words in your hand, seeing it as a real, tangible thing. To get a flavour of what it's all about, check out the book trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpMKn693JrQ And the even better news – the edit on the sequel is going really well so watch this space!

Whiplash

I watched a really good film recently – Whiplash, have you seen it? It only had a budget of $3.3 million which, in the scheme of film-making is tiny, and was shot in just 19 days but it's garnering attention. I won't say much about the plot because I don't want to ruin it for you but suffice it to say that there are no fancy visual gimmicks, there's just story. And the story is driven by the two main characters colliding. I've heard lots of authors give talks and the most notable quote about characters that I remember was given by Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher series, who said that plot is like a hire car – it gets you from beginning to end – but it’s the characters driving that car who move the story forward, they’re what/who the reader remembers. And this was certainly true for me in this film. But the film also resonated with me on another level (and it's hard to write about this without giving away any plot!) reminding me that anyone who achieves anything in their chosen field bears the scars of getting there – the knock backs, the fails, the sacrifices, the disappointments, the sheer damned hard work, the hours and hours of practice and the stubbornness of keeping on getting up each time you fall down and trying again. These scars may be invisible to those watching from afar but everyone putting their head above the parapet to try carries them and so deserves our admiration. If you get the chance to see Whiplash, do, it's an excellent story.

Not Orange but Happy

For those of you not living in the UK, a little explanation is needed. One of our mobile service providers used to be called Orange and they offered their customers a free cinema ticket every Wednesday. They launched this with a funny ad where the marketing team brainstormed what to call the promotion that happened every Wednesday, from a company called Orange, like clockwork, and they came up with… Orange Wednesdays.  For eight and a half years I've been juggling a full-time job, four kids and husband (actually they've all been around for longer than eight and a half years!) fitting writing in at the margins of my time which, as you can appreciate, hasn't been much time and therefore not much writing. For all sorts of different reasons I've now been able to reduce my working hours in my day-job to 4 full days per week which gives me one glorious day – Wednesday – to fill with words. And what does this have to do with Orange? Well, I've christened this day my Happy Wednesday because on Wednesday I'm so –er– happy, filling my time with words planned, words written, words edited, words proofread. I've only had a few and I'm in no way used to being off on a workday but the sense of freedom at the possibilities of what I could achieve each Wednesday morning is enough to make me jump out of bed grinning like a mad woman! That huge pile that is my writing to do list is actually looking like being achievable – 2015, it's going to be a great year!!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

It's that time of year when we've all been looking backwards at the highs and lows of 2014 and forwards to the great year we're all going to have in 2015, kind of a time to put things into perspective.

It's been a big year for me with lots of firsts, lots of travelling and a significant birthday so lots of celebrations. I've also, as you'll know if you read this blog regularly, had a big setback in the form of a monster case of RSI which has certainly been challenging. Plenty to reflect on.

But, you know, I got to thinking about my special moments of this past year and although some of the big ones were pretty spectacular – watching shooting stars from the top of a sand dune in the Sahara was very cool and watching my daughter at her first red carpet premiere in LA was really special – those kind of experiences are the exception, rather than the rule. Life is generally made up of smaller moments, crossing something off that to-do list, having a meal out with friends, remembering to exercise (always a challenge, that one!) And, bearing in mind what the trek to Everest Base Camp taught me, acknowledging and enjoying those is really living life to the full.

The start of a squeaky New Year is full of possibilities that we can achieve in these coming months what we didn't manage to last year – it's an exciting time! So, I'm looking backwards to go forwards,  building on the parts of my work in progress I didn't mess up, revising and editing like mad currently. I may not actually have said the words 'my New Year's resolution is . . .' but it amounts to the same thing and it means I can dip into my chocolate drawer without feeling guilty.

BOSFOK

So I started a blog post which went like this:

I've posted a lot lately about inspiration and passion and dedication. But what happens when you don't feel any of that? What if it's all just going wrong?

I'm currently halfway through getting comments back from test readers on my work in progress. This has been a real Frankenstein of a book and I know that in the words of one of my testers "there's a great book in there" but right now it's hiding itself quite successfully. I know exactly how this has happened – I conceived the book as one thing but, for one reason and another, was persuaded to write something else so the plot became too unwieldy and convoluted. Cue rewriting the second half of the story and the first edit spent trying to stitch them both together. I'm still having plot problems and trying to force square pegs into round holes and it's been making me miserable. Inspiration and passion are nowhere. Instead I've had to fall back on sheer stubbornness and shouting BOSFOK at myself – that's quite therapeutic! It isn't actually swearing, it stands for "bum on seat, fingers on keyboard" (pen in hand while editing actually, but BOSPIN doesn't give quite the same punch).

I know this funk is temporary. I'm right on the cusp of making it all work again, I just have to put in the hours to make it so. That's where being a Taurean and stubborn as hell is my strength!

And the great thing is that from when I drafted that I had a lightbulb moment: I got out of my own way and let the story flow and let the main character show herself how she really is and not how I was trying to portray her. Lesson learned in a very painful way! Now I'm really excited to rewrite the book, the only slight issue I have is that I have a very tight deadline in which to get it done. But I can do this (down time at Christmas, totally over-rated. . .) and am so excited to see this story exactly how it should be told.

Wishing on a comet

Unless you've been on a comet yourself over the last few days, you can't have failed to notice that the European Space Agency has landed a robotic probe on a comet some 300 million miles away from the Earth. This is pretty special for me because, in my day job, I work in the department where the British team who built the Ptolemy instrument (the one designed to analyse what the comet is made of in a bid to see if the commentary water is the same as that on earth) are based and it was amazing and brilliant to see them celebrating what, for some, has been 20+ years work with a successful landing. The best analogy for their attempt that I saw yesterday was that it was like 'launching a hammer from London to hit a nail in Delhi', although 'trying to land a fly on a bullet' was pretty good too.

You cannot fail to have been moved by Professor Monica Grady's overjoyed reaction when she hugged BBC's David Shukman (currently here if you haven't seen it http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30022765). This is true passion and dedication again – I seem to have been surrounded by a lot of it lately! It takes all that and more to get a space mission off the ground [pun intended :) ] and it takes an extraordinary amount of patience. Rosetta was initially due to be launched on the second Ariane rocket back in 2002 but when the first one exploded on the launch pad, it took two further years to ensure the second rocket wouldn't suffer the same fate before Rosetta could even leave the Earth.

Yesterday was truly inspiring and a huge achievement for mankind - the resultant leap forward in our technological prowess from this mission has been translated into areas such as healthcare and water quality. Our individual dreams might be smaller in scope but they may feel just as impossible sometimes. What's important is that for each knock back we get up and try again, from each setback we learn and hone our talent because then success has to be practically guaranteed.