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.