Feet or Fins cover image

I’ve found my book cover image AND I’ve turned it into a book cover 🙂

And it has taken me long enough to do so. For at least 18 months I have been looking around for the perfect picture.Something that I thought represented my story the best. I wasn’t keen on getting a designer to make one because I figured ‘why pay for something I can try myself?’ and when it comes down to it a cover image is just a picture and text. And if that didn’t work out then I’d go to someone. It hadn’t even been until recently that I had been in a position to consider paying someone.

In the meantime I just cruised around some photo stock websites browsing for images I thought were decent for what was inside the book. At first I was going to go with Getty, but then they upped the prices and there was no way I was even going to consider it.

Hello!? I was a student and students have no money.

I remember being pissed that the ‘perfect’ image I had picked had been under $50, but then it was over $200. In my anger I just decided that I was going somewhere else. And I’ve forgotten what that ‘perfect’ image even looked like now. Ironically I ended up with iStock, which is owned by Getty but images cost less. Yay? (How does that work?)

So I created a lightbox (overly fancy word for folder) and began adding images. Soon I had around 70, but while I liked the images and thought they held sway with the book, they weren’t quite perfect. At the time I stayed off buying because while they were cheaper, I was still living on a student income. Instead I just browsed the internet for info on book covers. Then a few weeks ago I came across this article ‘Book Cover Design and the Problem of Symbolism‘. Reading it just seemed to make my brain click and I began looking for more images, this time with a slightly different angle. I found some I liked and bingo!

I found one that seemed to address the main issue in the book.

I copied the watermarked image onto my computer and began playing around with it on both Pixlr.com and Paint.net. Within a few days I had something I liked and then I bought the large version earlier today 🙂 While it does take a bit of getting used to two different editing programs I think I made something pretty sufficient. I’ve been checking out publisher websites and while some of their book covers are way out of my skill set, others are quite simple (not meant in a negative way).

I pretty much like the image as it is so I’ve it and I’ve just laid text over it. I made sure to make the words are large so that they are easily readable as a thumbnail image. And here is the final product.