Today on Paws 4 Thought I’m happy to host the YA Author Rendezvous blog blitz. YAAR is a group of like-minded authors who have to come together to share and promote YA literature. I am happy to be part of this group.
In this guest post Sarah Wathen, author of the catchpenny series talks about covers and cover art.
A Picture Worth 100,000 Words
Woe to the author who has written her brain into knots, strangled her editor, and reworked her novel until she puked…who can’t find the right darn cover art. And if she could, would the perfect cover be worth $100,000 for her 100,000 words? My starving artist friends would say, “Heck, yes!” But many authors can’t afford to shell out even $1,000.
Luckily, plenty authors are also artists, especially in YA Author Rendezvous!
For me, it was a no-brainer, since my words and my artwork flow from the same creative well. I painted The Tramp long before I wrote it, and drawing the morphing figure for Catchpenny was just plain fun.
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Angela Caldwell is also a photographer, so she had the chops to pull off a great book cover. Her own father created some of the artwork, which made it even more special to her, because of the father/daughter relationship in her novel.
For Lauren Mayhew, it was about the entire package: “I wanted my book to be all my own creation, especially as it’s self-published.”
Debbie Manber Kupfer feels privileged to use her late father’s photographs of Jerusalem in her cover art. “My dad passed away before I became a published author and the difficult time of my life after his passing is talked about in my memoir, The Big C.”
Jason Latshaw worked with an artist friend to produce exactly what he needed. He created a photo mock-up and directed how his monsters should be drawn, as the terror that lurks below the clouds.
Veda Stamps hosted a competition on DesignCrowd for the artwork and then used her own graphic design skills to finish the job.
T.D. Shields designed her first, but needed an artist for her second book cover. “I think it’s important to have a really attractive, professional-looking cover in order to catch people’s attention, so I was willing to put out the money.”
Music to any starving artist’s ears! Though maybe hard for the struggling author to stomach, we aren’t strangers to paying it forward. Whatever it takes for that picture worth your 100,000 words!
Written by Sarah Wathen, with plenty of help from her friends in Young Adult Author Rendezvous! Sarah works as an artist and author in Florida, with her husband, son, and about a dozen imaginary friends from her books, The Tramp and Catchpenny, both released in 2015.
Enter the YAAR giveaway for a chance to win a whole host of prizes including an ebook of P.A.W.S. and an audio book of Will There Be Watermelons on Mars?!
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