Book cover design is one of those areas where I’m still learning. Over the last couple of months I’ve been working on getting better at it. The first cover that I did myself was for Cthulhu Unbound, my first self-published ebook. If you don’t have a copy, I highly recommend picking one up. It’s a satirical Lovecraftian tale that pretty much reads like the real thing until you get to the twist at the end.
At any rate, the old cover used the same image as the current one, but the difference was that when I put it together I tried to employ the flashing color method to make it look cool by using red letters on a green background. As a lossless PNG it looked great, but when rendered as a JPG it turned into a mess and looked kind of terrible. And unfortunately, JPG is the standard that gets used everywhere. I spent awhile trying to fix it so that the JPG would still look good, but eventually I gave up.
More recently, I decided to redo the cover. I put together a new version that uses white text instead of red on the green background. As you can see it looks a lot better with the white, especially as a JPG. I did like the red lettering, but one of the things you learn producing books is that some things just don’t work. You need to experiment, and keep at it until you get something that really works. The covers I’ve done since then have been better, including the one for The Pathless Void that I posted a week ago. That one is minimalistic, but it really looks great and I can’t think of anything that would improve it.
Anyway, I haven’t talked about Cthulhu Unbound in awhile but it’s still out there, and now it has a cool new cover for you to check out. The ebook includes the short story and a sample from the beginning of my novel Arcana for your reading pleasure.
S C O T T M I C H A E L S T E N W I C K 