Let’s Talk About Book Covers

Sometimes you must step away from the tedious to clear the mind.

I have been editing since last month and have enjoyed doing it. Editing is tedious work. Honestly, it is not as creative or fun as I would like it to be. Like I said, I enjoy it, but it needs some space at times. Beyond the editing of basic grammar which is handled by so many tools today such as Grammarly, Word, Google Docs, or anything built into almost everything we use to type on these days, Autocrit has been great at helping me work through the process. It is so interesting to work through the analysis reports it creates to improve your writing.

On a completely different note, I started playing with cover designs. Now that is a completely creative process. One you can get lost in. Way back in the day, I went to college with the idea I was going to be a graphic designer. This was long before computers were even much of a thing in the world of graphic design. So I have a little bit of experience in graphic design. Fast forward so many years and now you can do so much with software and website tools like Canva, Paint, and Gimp.

VEHO’s design was created using some AI tools and Canva. Different elements were created in AI that I liked and worked with in Canva to create what I wanted. That was more or less about getting something out there that would allow me to get the story up. This time around it has been much more about doing it myself.

I didn’t go into this half-cocked though. Like I tend to do, I jumped down the rabbit hole about what elements need to be considered for a good science fiction book cover. Digging through the ends of the internet led me to quite a few interesting guides, suggestions, and blogs that book cover artists have written. I love the internet, you can find almost anything. I even found a few books written on the topic.

Here are a few of those elements:

The title is very important when you are doing what I am trying to do here. It needs to hit certain marks that allow the book to be searchable on Amazon and pertinent to the genre that it represents. That was an entirely different rabbit hole that I jumped down and should probably be covered in its own newsletter/blog. Let’s just say that it's a whole thing…

The title “should be legible and eye-catching, and should convey the tone of the book. Science fiction titles tend to have a futuristic or technological feel, so fonts with clean lines and sharp angles are often used.” (Creative Paramita, Book Cover Artist).

The color scheme should be bold and attention-grabbing.

The cover should conform to the social norms of the genre. The imagery on a science fiction book cover should be both relevant to the book and visually striking. Spaceships, aliens, and futuristic cities are common imagery choices for science fiction book covers.

So with all this in hand, I started to design my cover.

I think I have shared some of the concept art that I used AI to create in order to test some of my ideas along the way. I knew from very early on that the cover would include a couple of elements. First, a space station set in deep space off in the distance. This story takes place in a space station so it felt right. Second, a floating helmet that was damaged and contained a skull. From those two elements, I went to work.

I created the elements separately using Paint S, Gimp, and Canva. Canva is a really fantastic tool that allows you to create from all sorts of templates, and book covers just happen to be one of them.

I used a template from Canva, added a stock space photo from Canva, and then added my other two elements along with my title and author name. I spent way too many hours messing around with the arrangement and applying some filters to give the image a bit of graininess, but it was really creative and fun.

Initially, I created about twenty versions of the cover and then narrowed it down to about six. Then I reached out to some trusted friends and begged for some feedback on which ones they liked.

One of them rose to the top when it came to getting feedback.

As it stands, here is my book cover. It may change, but I doubt it.