Tara Maya's Tales

Let's say you have to make a cover on the cheap. You're an indie author, for instance, and you foolishly blew your cover art budget on a bowl of instant ramen noodle. Tsk tsk tsk. Always thinking with your stomach! Your first plan was to hire Stephan Martinière to paint an original scene from your novel. That fell through when you found out it would cost more than your monthly mortgage payment. So now you're back to making your own cover. Anyway, you figure, no biggie. You don't need a scene from your novel anyway. What could be simpler than throwing the title over a moody picture and calling it a day? Lots of covers are no more than text over a vague scenic background or abstract pattern... right? Right! But if you want to go this route, you have to realize two things: 1. You'll be using text as art. 2. That's a lot harder than it sounds. So you can't just slap your title up in Times New Roman or Papyrus and expect that to look good. In a sen...

One more day ... With just ONE DAY LEFT to the release of Wing, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the book cover. What goes into the design of a book cover? The first consideration is obvious: a cover should have aesthetic appeal. The image should caress the imagination, not assault the eyes. One mistake that some writers make, when they have control over their covers, is to want to stuff all the events of the book into the cover. Or they want to show a scene (not always a bad idea) with every detail exactly as it is in the book (always a bad idea). For a lot of reasons, that's not practical. Yes, sometimes the artist has time and a budget of thousands of dollars to hire models, make sketches, paint with oils, let the oils dry, die tragically young after lobbing off a few facial features, become famous after death, have his paintings posthumously sell for millions at auction,  have other artists rip off his style in cheap knock-off paintings done in artistic slave ...