Transformations

 These last few months I have renewed most of my e-book covers.

The e-covers are easy and I enjoy doing them. Some turn out better than others, but even so, it is a pleasure, and gives me a task to do while I await inspiration as to the story I am supposedly moving forward.

I am finding the paperback covers much harder to change and given the low number of paperbacks sold, I'm wondering if it is worth the hours it takes. Or the frustration, for that matter. Amazon instructions are never harder to interpret than when loading book covers!

On the other hand, I should be able to manage it, given time and patience. 

It is hard to believe that the two boys in the picture are now in their fifties and one is actually having his sixtieth birthday this year! This is one of the many slides dh and I retireved using a film scanner.

Out with the Old

My old photo slides are now in the wastepaper bin. They've been waiting in the attic for a good many years.

Now they have been digitally copied, run through Photoshop and the pictures are now safely on my computer. If anyone wants the now redundant film scanner, do let me know. It has now done its job for me. 

The clarity of the digital pic is not as good as the original but since there is no way I will ever get all the old gear from the attic and set up a projector and screen in the living room, this is as good as it gets. 

I have also been busy on another new cover. Taking to heart the advice offered by Bryan Cohen's webcasts, I "saw" that some of my covers were not "genre relevant". So I am on a mission to rectify that. 

He means that a romance ought to be recognised as a romance within the first seconds of seeing the cover. That's genre recognition in action. Subconsciously we recognise a thriller from the cover style, and some  - like the Jack Reacher covers - have become almost a brand. Another thing I learned from Cathy Helms and Tamian Wood is that choice (and use) of font is as important as the picture. And finally ~ I managed to use a layer mask successfully!