OUUROBOROS

Okay, so! I've successfully got my head around the formatting of my ebook, and I'm really proud of what I have so far! I'm actually going to do one last-minute edit of the stories before I post it, but right now I'm waiting on the ISBN number to come through. It's all very exciting! I've got it working on my Kindle, and it all looked great -
Except for the cover.
Puddlenuts.

I already posted the old cover I made for the ebook. Unfortunately, I hadn't really considered how it would look on the Kindle, and it was just too dark. The text was too thin and didn't show up, and it was so dark that the designs couldn't be seen. So, it was back to the drawing board! Eurgh.

I worked on it for some time, and then came up with this.

The resolution of it isn't that great uploaded to this blog, it's a little blurry, but in real life it's huge, and all the lines are crisp. I swear! And it now actually looks rather good on a Kindle!

I made this ebook cover in GIMP, and it took me about an hour of messing around. The background is a soft grey, and a free paper texture from bashcorpo on deviantart gives it a bit more life at full-res especially. I pasted this in as another layer over the base, and turned the opacity down extremely low.

The fonts are the same as last time; Infinity and Jura. If you look at most books, you'll find that they have two fonts on them from different font families, and that's what I've tried to replicate. The cogs are free brushes, obtained from coolestbrushes. The spider image is from a photo on freerangestock, by Danilo, and I cut it out from the background and turned it into a silhouette. Everything I've used is free for personal and commercial use, and has been really useful to me. You always gotta check the terms of use e____e It's quite a chore to find good resources for free. Either of these sites, I can recommend.

Let this be a lesson to all wannabe-ebook-cover designers! If it doesn't display well on an ebook reader, you haven't done your job.

Next post will be an actual tutorial of how to format an ebook the way I did, because it was so profoundly stupid and took so long and turned me into this:

Seriously, there was no decent guide as to how to do it with a word document anywhere on the internet! My heyday as a master of google-fu seems to be over. It will be explained.


In other (hopefully more interesting) news; the rewrite of number 5 is going well. I'm actually quite enjoying it now! The Ministers get to be their creepy, diabolical selves in it, and it's all fabulously disturbing. Here's to a life of crime for Carina! And hopefully a less boring post next time.

On an unrelated note my little brother just set off the fire alarm frying sausages. He offered to make me some too, and put them in some toast. The toast is sliced bigger than a doorstop and the house is full of smoke, but it's the thought that counts. The last time he tried to make food for us both he brought me back two bowls - one of plain pasta, and the other of plain rice (?). This is definitely an improvement.

Hello, hello! ♥ What I have promised, I shall deliver!
This is my (so far) completed ebook cover design. I worked out the final details today. I'm quite pleased with it, though I expect I'll be changing things around every now and then. This is the cover for the full set of shorts, though I'll also be releasing them as four sets of three. These will each have slightly different covers, as I'll explain below.
So, here we go! Unfortunately you can't get a drumroll on a blog, so you'll just need to imagine one.

♥ Ta-dah! I really hope you like it. For my first ebook design ever, I guess I'm pretty proud of it.
You will see that there are twelve cogs in total on the design - one for each short story - and they've all been woven together by the threads of a spider. Appropriate, no?
It could also stand for the twelve characters explored through the stories, all trapped in the machine.
I wanted to keep a dark, bitter undertone, so chose a simple and futuristic design. I hope it's fairly effective - it took a long time before I was happy with the arrangement of the cogs. And here's the deal! - you see the three larger cogs with hollow centres? Each short story has it's own symbol, that will appear on the chapter divider pages, and as I'm releasing them in sets of three I'll add the symbols of each book into the cogs. For example - Opposite Day has a lightning bolt, Another Bite of the Apple has a gun, Quantum Entanglement has an atom, Against the Machine is a swallow - the list goes on. 
So, here it is - I tried my best. I'm proud of it, so I can only hope that others will like it as much as I do.
Ifyoudon'tlikeityouareclearlyjustanunculturedpeasant.

Cog vectors were downloaded from shapes4free.com and are free for personal and commercial use. Thank you! ♥ 

So this is being written basically to put off my Chemistry revision (exam is in two days. Christ.) and because my friends are being funsponges and ignoring my whinging on the matter on skype. Boo, commoners!
Whinging is pretty pointless if no one gives it attention :( My friends are peasants. I'm not being narcissistic at all here. Gosh.
All you need to know about this one is that my self-esteem is not going to recover after this exam. This is going to be abysmal.

This post does actually have a point, of course - and that is that I'm trying to design my ebook cover! My laptop was broken so I was using my Dad's at this point (I got it back today) and so what I've got so far has been made in GIMP rather than my usual Photoshop. It's not done, my original design idea turned out not looking so great so I had to scrap most of it. But I've sorted the typesetting and the background and so decided I might as well post my progress.
It was born out of a desire to escape Chemistry revision and We've Lost Our Moral Compass, and me stumbling across lousybookcovers.tumblr.com. I can remember thinking, as I scrolled through it – this is not going to be me. I absolutely refuse! So, I decided then and there to make my ebook's cover. For one thing, it was a valid reason to procrastinate. I was going to have to do it sooner or later, and I might as well get it done while I was feeling creative. You can see the first part right at the top! I personally feel it's pretty snazzy so far, especially for someone who isn't so interested in graphic design. I'm not posting the whole thing yet (partially because this is only a start) and though it doesn't look very impressive now I hope it will later!

I had a look at the covers of the books in my room, and tried to figure out which ones worked and which ones didn't. The first thing I looked at was typesetting - most book covers have two different fonts - and I picked Jura and Infinity after a quick google search. I experimented with sizes/combinations on MS Paint (stay classy) before hopping over to GIMP and arranging them.

The background itself, I already knew that I wanted to be navy blue. Not as harsh with white text as black, and it suits the nature of my writing. I added more colours and hues with a low-opacity layer and a fuzzy paintbrush (deep purples and greens) to give depth, and also incorporated a free paper texture from bashcorpo. I noticed in my bookshelf 'market research' that covers looked better with a faint texture to them rather than flat colour, so I turned down the opacity on it, adjusted the colours and erased some distracting darker areas. I quite like how it turned out!

I was drawing the images to use on the cover by hand (I had a little picture for each story drawn out, but it didn't look so great on the mock-up so I'm rethinking the design) and now I'm having a long think before I commit to another. I'll be creating it myself in either Photoshop or Illustrator, but whatever happens I want it too look professional and classy. Think cogs and gears, perhaps a swallow. I'm going to take my time on this one! I'm determined to do it right. I'll post the full cover just as soon as I finish it - and hopefully soon after (drumroll...)
My first three stories will be available to download  for free! (:

LOOK IT'S THE BOTTOM PART OF MY BOOK COVER AND IT HAS MY NAME ON IT
AM I A REAL AUTHOR NOW?

Okay, I really need to do some Chemistry.