The Art of the Cover, Part 2

Bringing it all together. You've got the artwork, now what?

Working with my designer, Charlotte Moore, we arrived at the cover for The Reluctant Dragon in stages, from sketch (far left), to the almost finished version. 

In all his glory, the complete The Reluctant Dragon audiobook cover by Charlotte Moore 

Topics in this blog:

• Sketching the cover
• Downloading and working with photos and art
• Specifications
• Rectangles to squares--a most important journey
• Using your own art or photographs

Just a reminder: this blog series is aimed at narrators who have taken on the responsibility of creating the completed cover for their public domain audiobooks, as is often the case with narrators working with Listen2aBook. The material covered in these blogs is not restricted to just one publisher, and there may be other publishers who welcome a complete audiobook package—from narration, to mastering, to completed covers for submission to Audible or another online audiobook distributors. I refer to Listen2aBook because I’ve been successfully narrating for L2aB for more than a year now, and I’ve enjoyed the total process of working with Steven Jay Cohen who has helped me move my last five books to Audible.

In the last blog, I talked about finding artwork, graphics, or photographs (or all three) suitable for the cover of your public domain audiobook. Now it’s time to begin assembling the several components of a memorable, sales-inspiring, cover.

Paper and Pencil

Sketch out your cover with pencil and paper before you open up your design program. You don’t need to be overly artsy or detailed at this stage; you’re just looking to organize your thoughts and visualize the general cover design. Draw a good-sized square—I’d recommend two squares per sheet of regular printer paper, so that’s two 5”x5” squares—and quickly sketch in the basic shapes of the artwork you’re considering for the cover. And I mean quickly. 

Don’t obsess over the sketch. You just want the key elements down on the paper so you can figure out the best placement for the title and your own credit line. Keep in mind that your cover needs to be distinguishable from a distance of three feet.

Tip #1: The Yardstick Standard

Just for giggles, find a yardstick and hold it up between your face and the screen on your laptop or desktop monitor. Now, look at images or texts on the screen and see which ones are easy to read or discern from a yard away, and which ones have elements too small to pick out. If you have to strain to figure out what is actually in an image, that tells you that your cover had better be easy to figure out from the same distance.

Cocktail Napkin Trick

If all else fails, and you get stuck on the drawing, pretend you’re at a restaurant or bar, and you’ve got a minute or two to sketch an idea out for someone sitting with you at the table. You grab a cocktail napkin or one of those square cork coasters, and sketch the basics of the cover. That’s the designer’s version of the 30-second elevator speech.

Squaring a Rectangle

You will find very quickly that some of the elements you want to place within the square cover’s borders are rectangles—like a sweeping landscape of mountains, or an image of a spiral galaxy, or wide cityscape, or the full width grill of a car—and you will have to make a decision: use the image as is, which will limit it in size on your square (and make it harder to recognize in the Audible version); or crop the image. 

When I was designing the cover for The Virginian, I used a photograph I’d taken of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains at sunset. As you can see below, it is definitely a rectangular image. But I really wanted to use it for the cover of the Western novel, so I made the decision to lop off about a third of the right side of the picture and a bit of the left to get to my square format.

One of the difficult parts of this cover was the font selection for the title. I worked closely with Brian Lee, a terrific designer in Raleigh, NC, to declutter my original font choice, and clean up the overall image. Brian's advice was to go with a classic font for the title, and drop the distracting graphics. In addition, he massaged the lower portion of the mountain picture to add an intensity to the darker areas that was lacking in the original. This is a classic example of how working with a designer can polish an otherwise amateur product. 

Three stages in the early layouts from a rectangular image, far left, to a square format. 

And here's the final cover as displayed on Audible

This version is about as simple as I could get. 

If you really need the entire rectangular element either because you are totally wedded to it, or because any cropping would take away from its visual message, just understand that when you place it, you will need to do something about the empty space that will remain in the square. The solution could be as simple as putting in a background color or pattern that works with the image, or using the open space for your title and credits or additional images or art elements. 

In the series of images below, I was trying to find one that would best portray key elements of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, This Side of Paradise, about a young man's journey from boyhood and Princeton, all the while navigating the tortuous world of love and loss. I had sketched out something that had one of Princeton's major buildings, but it was too tall and lacked a message by itself. Then I looked at drawings by C.D. Gibson, a noted artist of the time (famous for his Gibson Girls), and began narrowing my hunt until I found a horizontal panel that could be cropped to a tight square (final frame). By hand-coloring the image in Photoshop, and adding the title in a big, bold, shadowed font, my original idea became the Audible cover. 

These panels represent a long search for the right image to begin the cover design process. From the tall rectangle of Princeton, to the busy horizontal rectangle of two lovers, to the square format, the goal was to simplify and honor the theme of the book

This exercise has three benefits:

• It will simplify your thoughts about the cover;
• It forces you to work in a square;
• It will give you something to share with a designer should you go in that direction.

Although my own assembly workflow takes place using Photoshop CC, the drag-and-drop and sizing techniques are pretty much universal among graphic arts software—even basic ones. There are a couple of caveats, so let’s deal with those right off the bat:

1.  Image Size. Big is not only good, it is required. That tiny 147KB thumbnail image, with a resolution of 72 pixels per inch (ppi) you pulled up in a Google search might work on your laptop screen, or on your phone, but it will not stand up to Audible’s standards. Your completed cover is going to be 2400 pixels by 2400 pixels at a minimum resolution of 100 ppi. That’s a file that can range from 6-16MB, uncompressed, to anywhere from 1.5MB to 4MB compressed as a jpeg. When you are selecting your art, think big; you can always scale a photo or piece of artwork down from huge to modest, but you can’t expect something tiny to withstand significant enlargement.

2. Resolution. Be consistent in image resolution. When you begin sizing your photos or art, make sure all the elements you work with share the same ppi resolution. All my cover art elements are 100 ppi images. If I were making the images for sale as 20” x 40” posters, for example, the resolution would be much higher, 400 ppi at minimum, and probably much more. An audiobook cover is relatively tiny compared to that, but it still has to stand on-screen scrutiny and be readable from a distance of three feet. If you are working with a picture that is 100 ppi that you place with an art image that is, say, 150 ppi, the two elements will conflict with each other as you place them, scale them, or otherwise manipulate them. Whether you choose 100 ppi or 150 ppi or higher, stick to one resolution setting all the way through.

Tip #2: If you decide to work with a designer, be sure to impart these directives about size and resolution to him or her before they get started with their layouts. Few things will tick off a designer more than finding out that there were standards that had to be met right at the beginning.

Using your own art or photographs—with one caution

There are no rules against using your own art or photographs for your audiobook cover. The obvious advantage is that you own the work and are thus exempt, to a point, from the whole copyright issue. To a point. You still need to be very careful that your cover design, using your own photograph, does not include recognizable images of living persons from whom you have not gotten a model release. This means anyone who can be easily recognized in the photo—your Aunt Sarah, your office baseball team colleagues, a woman standing by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a photogenic Nebraska farmer, a colorful busker on a street corner in L.A.—will have to agree, via a model release, to your use of their image.

Let’s say you’ve just completed narrating a lovely book about babies, and you decide that the cover would pop with that great picture you took the other day of your neighbor’s six-month-old boy. Your neighbor loves the idea, and says, “Sure, that’s a wonderful shot, go ahead.” Get it in writing. I know Audible requires proof of a model release, and you should proceed on the assumption that all publishers will require similar proof.  

The other sticking point concerns recognizable properties with logos or other trademark signs on them. A New York cityscape featuring many buildings is pretty generic and probably okay to use on your cover; a picture of a hot little café down in Greenwich Village, with the restaurant’s name over the door, is subject to copyright and you need permission to use that picture on your audiobook cover. Just use common sense; put yourself in the shoes of the person whose picture you like, or the owner of the business you photographed, and ask yourself if you would want that image to be out on the Internet without written permission.

Coming Up Next

In the next installment of But What If I’m Write? I’ll address the subject of titles and the typefaces (fonts) that can really draw a potential buyer to your audiobook. You may not be able to change your audiobook’s title, but you most certainly can give it the star treatment when it comes to laying out your very own cover.