Let’s talk about making book covers.

The good thing about being an independent (indie) and a self-publishing (self-pub) writer is that you get to prepare your own book covers. The bad thing about being an indie and self-pub writer is that you get to prepare your own book covers.

You either love doing it, or you don’t. Luckily, there are many book cover designers that you can hire to do your book cover these days, but as I haven’t used any, I’m here to talk about the other option: making it yourself.

I am merely writing this down to record my own experience and journey, and in no way I am saying that this is what one should or shouldn’t do. If you are a fellow indie/self-pub writer, at the end of the day you’ll realize that you’ll find your own voice and ways to do things.

Though the appeal of using ready-stock images and easy-to-use image editing apps may be calling, for my previous book and the coming one I used the old-fashioned ways. I took the pictures myself or I drew things by hand and used a ‘licensed for commercial use’ program to make them. One might argue that such licensed programs are expensive and since we don’t even know yet if one would make profits from the book itself, why pay that much? Well, I can tell you one thing: some things are worth investing in. If something can put an ease to my mind for not having anyone claim that I stole their photo/illustration some time in the future, then by all means, sign me up!

To be honest, the main reason why I do this the old-fashioned way is because I do judge a book by its cover. In my humble opinion, when one uses ready-stock images or easy-to-use image editing apps, there’s always a risk that the book cover in question would end up looking similar to others’. If I only have one shot to catch a possible reader’s attention, I’d want my book cover to be different than others.

So the first thing I did when designing my very first book cover was to decide what I didn’t want. Psychological thriller/mystery books often have a person on the cover, with his/her back facing the viewer, usually either a person that looks like a detective or the ‘victim’ running away to the dark. Have you ever noticed this? I have. And speaking of dark, dark colors are used immensely as well. Early on in the days of my designing my book cover, I knew that I didn’t want any of these.

By this time, I already knew the title of my book (FYI, it’s not strange for me to not have a title until the very last moment) so for my first book, that was what I looked at next, and took quite a literal translation to it.

Of course it was only natural that I had to have sugar on the cover of my first book, Sweet Like Sugar. Sugar was, after all, the coating of everything in that story. But underneath the sugar lies something dark, so I had it photographed on top of a black plate, with just a tiny bit of black lurking from beneath it.

As seen from my sketches, I didn’t plan on having a hand print on the cover. But as I was trying to get the right kind of surface, playing with all the sugar with my bare hands, the idea started to form in my head.

After taking dozens of the same shots, I decided to develop both ideas and see which one came out better.

I don’t know about you, but I liked the hand print better! And yet, something is still not quite right. It wasn’t until I played with the saturation that it dawned on me: the color had to be something else than white.

You know that feeling of craving for something sweet, and then you finally get to eat a whole lot of that sweetness until you get so sick from it? Sickeningly sweet. That was what I wanted it to be. That was what I wanted the book cover to ‘taste’ like.

And that was how I got to this end result.

To others, it probably doesn’t seem like it was a lot of work, but I did spend a considerable amount of my time for it. Maybe I was just too slow, but I am still damn proud of my first book cover. It has the right amount of eye-catchiness, the right amount of sweetness, and the right amount of unsettling darkness.