Sunday, February 26, 2012

Nothing Serious

The cover is done.  I forget where I am on the interior.  Probably done.  I admit I'm distracted by trying to follow too many issues today.


What you can't see is the template I downloaded from CreateSpace is underneath everything, it's just turned off.
I'm trying to think what I can tell you about cover design that I haven't already said.  Each element should have it's own layer.  Barbara Morgenroth front and Barbara Morgenroth spine are separate layers so if I should mess up one, nothing else is effected.

This concept was something hard for me to understand before I started working with Photoshop.  I didn't understand layers because I had never seen them.  It seems in life everything is flat.  If you draw something then color it in, it seems like 1 layer because it's a flat piece of paper.  In reality it's 3 layers--the paper, the drawing and the color.  In Photoshop that becomes apparent.  It's good to have everything segregated and safe.  Then at some point you can merge all the layers down.  I don't advise doing that.  Or go ahead and do it, just make sure you keep a working file that's not merged.  Once you merge and save, that's it, you're not unmerging; the layers are glued together forever.  The problem with that is if you want to go back and change anything, you'll probably have to rebuild the image. 

Dream Horse is ready to be printed.  Murder is scheduled to be printed--I'll use that for a giveaway at GoodReads (is there a more difficult site to navigate than that or is it just me?)

Good thing I did this post.  I realized I needed to put LARGE PRINT on the back cover.  It's not necessary for Amazon, but if I ever decide to go with the Extended Distribution, it would be correct to have that prominently displayed because being large print is definitely a selling point.

No comments: