I was looking at paying for a cover online. My girlfriend and I talked about it a few times. She likes to paint but hadn’t done much in the last few years. My concern with a pricy cover is that I had a very specific moment and vision from my book, outsourcing it may not have captured exactly what I wanted: a silhouette of a tree, a colour fade in the background, and a cloaked figure.

We found a cover online that I liked:

Because I was still writing my book, my girlfriend decided to take a few attempts at painting a purple sunset galaxy and I gave her a month as a soft deadline. I am a savvy computer user and downloaded a free photo editing program called GIMP. We took her first painting and started playing around with some of the features.

While she was working on her second attempt I started to look at licensing some images. The moon never changed. The position did. The tree changed multiple times. I originally had something more Charlie Brown’esque. Then I went through at least a dozen trees in full bloom eventually settling on the one that we have now. Here is an early attempt:

To test further, I then took a few images off on Google image as samples. I gave the moon a glow effect, respositioned it, and created my title text shadow.

When my girlfriend finished, we put her background into my template and we both knew it was a hit. The colours were perfect and the foreground came to life the second we combined them. I also made this cover into a puzzle for my editor as a gift. Here is the original painting.

The thing I like most about the cover is how meaningful it is because it has a piece of my girlfriend’s work and my work, it is a specific moment from the book, and it looks beautiful!

Covers are really important. This is my first book and as I was browsing some of the other indie authors I saw some weak covers. My goal was to make something that you couldn’t tell I had cooked up at my desk and I think the finished product looks very professional!

I LOVE MY COVER!

Come grab a copy and check out this amazing project!

Keep those minds sharp and happy readings!

B.A. Bellec

babellec.com/links