This week’s
blog is the first of a three-part series about finding or creating the right
art for the cover of your public-domain audiobook. While most of my comments
are based on my own cover art for five public domain audiobooks produced by Listen2aBook, the ideas behind
selecting art that will give your audiobook that first good impression are
universal.
Because you have studied the book, taken notes (see the September 10 blog), and nurtured the story with your voice, proofing, editing, and mastering, you know every character, every scene, and, most important, the very idea of the book. You know in your sleep what the cover possibilities are. If there are strong characters who have carried the plot along from start to finish, you can see their faces—there’s a cover. If the story is sweeping and epic, you can picture the landscapes or locales that provide the story’s background—there’s a cover. If the book delves into the intellect and the world of ideas, religion, government, there are images that call to mind those very concepts—those are cover ideas. Reduce all the elements of the story to a 30-second elevator pitch and describe your audiobook to your passenger. There’s the core of your cover.
Why should you be in control of your own
art?
- First impressions count. Great cover art may not, by itself, sell your audiobook; but mediocre or murky cover art will do nothing to encourage customers to buy.
- Just as the beauty of narrating public domain books is not worrying about publication rights, gathering public domain artwork to match your audiobook is equally hassle-free.
- It’s creative. It gives you a ton of control over how your book will be seen in a very competitive market, and because you form such a close relationship with the book’s subject matter, you’ll probably already have some idea of what the cover should look like by the time you complete the narration.
- It’s a matter of dollars and cents. If you can pull the art together, you can minimize or eliminate the expenses of hiring a designer, and in a royalty market, every cent you can save upfront improves your cash flow down the road.
- It’s gratifying. When my first public domain book, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, made it to Audible, I felt an extra pump just looking at a cover I’d designed. It felt like there was more ownership of the audiobook, and it was a great feeling.
 |
| My First Public Domain Audiobook |
You don’t have to be an artsy designer
type to create your own cover art.
What you need
is a sense of what you would want to see on the cover of your audiobook. I won’t
minimize the value of bringing design and artistic abilities to the process,
but if you are competent at downloading photos or graphics, sizing images with
your favorite program, and if you like playing with typefaces, you can produce
your own audiobook cover art. Really.
You really don’t need Photoshop to
create your cover art.
I promise you,
you don’t. I use Photoshop CC because I’ve been a Photoshop user as a
professional and in retirement for 25 years, and I am invested in it as a
photographer and designer. But, as these alternatives suggested by creativeblog.com
and gizmodo.com
and beebom.com
indicate, there are perfectly suitable graphics programs that offer all the
tools you’ll need to do your own cover art.
If you do want to work with a designer,
you can help reduce your costs.
By knowing what
you want your cover to look like, and by having already selected some images
and typefaces (fonts), you can compress the design stage and the time you spend
working with a designer. Of the five covers covered in this blog, The Reluctant Dragon was completely
produced by my daughter, Charlotte, an artist/designer; The
Virginian was a blending of a photograph of mine and the fine-tuning of a
designer who came up with the most appropriate typeface; and three of the
covers--The Lincoln Trio, This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and Damned--incorporated public-domain
images or artwork I either photographed or downloaded to which I added
typefaces appropriate to the books’ titles and credits.
 |
| Cover Art by Charlotte Moore |
To choose new or retrieve from the
distant past?
Let’s define
public domain in two categories: Contemporary photos and images that have been
released to the public by their still-living creators; and photographs and
images dating back more than 70+ years (before 1923), for which the copyrights have
expired and the creators are no more. For a more detailed (but easy to read)
explanation of what constitutes a public domain work, take a look at Public Domain Sherpa.
Free-but-really-not-for-free public
domain images (New)
There are recently-created
public domain images all across the Web, and whether you choose to go diving
deep into your favorite search engine for public domain images, or visit or
subscribe to public domain image suppliers like Pixabay or Public Domain Pictures, there are literally millions of
pictures available to you. I haven’t explored all the public domain image
sites, but I have found that while quite a few offer a “free” download option
for their images, they often promote a subscription-with-fee upgrade for higher
resolutions versions of the free images.
However…and
this is a biggie…you are responsible for making sure there are no copyright or other rights
issues attached to the image. Reputable web-based companies that
provide catalogues of public domain pictures or graphics will say they are
covered by a Creative
Commons or a Public Copyright license which is, in theory, an okay by the
creator of the image to download the work. It behooves (good word) you to be
cautious and confirm the free-use of any image you download for commercial
purposes (like an audiobook cover).
Tip #1: It is possible that the creator of a Creative
Commons image requires a credit line on the image, so check carefully before
you proceed.
Really for free public domain images
(Distant Past)
On my desk here
in the Dungeon rests a rather weighty 113-year-old art portfolio, titled EIGHTY DRAWINGS INCLUDING THE WEAKER SEX:
THE STORY OF A SUSCEPTIBLE BACHELOR BY C.D. GIBSON. Yep, the same Charles
Dana Gibson who gave the world The Gibson Girl. The book is a first printing,
and more than qualifies as a public domain source. The book has been in the
family since Charles Gibson gave it to my great grandfather shortly after the
portfolio was published.
When I was
narrating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side
of Paradise, which takes place in the 1900-1910s, I read a description in
an early chapter of the protagonist’s first day at Princeton when he stops by a
college store and sees through the front window, “…prints of Gibson Girls that
lined the walls.” And because the book’s hero, Amory Blaine, is constantly
falling in and out of relationships with beautiful women of that era, the
Gibson Girl ideal is sustained throughout the story. I am fortunate
to have a 113-year-old reference source right at hand, but if I’d not had the
book, and still wanted the Gibson Girl image, it was no further away than a
quick Google search of “Gibson Girl images’ (see screenshot below).
 |
| Original Art from a 113-Year-Old Portfolio Colorization and Title by Me |
Public Domain from the Public Records
In my search
for images to illustrate the cover of The
Lincoln Trio: Abraham Lincoln’s Three Greatest Speeches, I turned to Google
and found a photograph of Lincoln delivering his Second Inaugural address (one
of the three speeches narrated in the audiobook). I specifically chose the
image from the Library of Congress (LOC) because it comes from a trusted public
source—not that I needed to worry about a public domain rights question for a
150-year-old photograph, but caution is a good thing when it comes to the use
of images.
 |
| Image from the Library of Congress |
Tip #2:
Whenever you can source an
image through a respected public records site like the Library of Congress, you
can be pretty sure you’re getting the real deal.
Tip #3:
Download the largest image
possible. Audiobook covers need to be sized to 2400 x 2400 pixels, at a screen
resolution no less than 72 dots or pixels per inch (dpi).
Public Domain
from the past (and free)
Sometimes, the
artwork you want for your cover is actual artwork—a drawing, an oil painting, a
watercolor, a sculpture, maybe even cave art. Common sense, and U.S. copyright
law, suggests that if the art was published prior to 1923, it’s probably available
for free. Such was the case for my cover of The
Beautiful and Damned, which features the art of Neysa McMein, an early 20th
century artist known for her covers of major magazines of the day. This particular
image, painted and published in 1916, matched perfectly the mid-date of the
novel, and portrays a young woman who, to my way of thinking, represents the
heroine of the story. Even though McMein
died in 1949, the artwork, published in 1916, is fair game for downloading and
repurposing as cover art for an audiobook.
 |
| Public Domain Art From 1916 |
Some caveats about public domain works.
It is incumbent
on you, the end-user of the work, to be certain it is in the public domain. A 2016
photograph of an 1890 painting of Big Ben in London, no matter how generic in
appearance, is a protected work even though the painting itself is not
protected. Unless that photograph is part of a government collection made
available to the public, or the creator of the photograph has released it under
Creative Commons, or the photograph was made prior to 1923, you should consider
skipping it (or, fly to London and take your own picture). Also, if the work of
art or photograph, even if published prior to 1923, features a still-living and
recognizable person, you should tread carefully when considering using the
image for an audiobook cover.
Coming Up in But
What If I’m Write?
- Downloading and working with artwork for your audiobook cover
- Specifications
- Using your own art or photographs
- Selecting typefaces
- Positioning the Title
- Adding credit lines
No comments:
Post a Comment