Last night I headed down to Portsmouth to give a talk on self-publishing. Held at the New Theatre Royal I was quite looking forward to a bit of theatrical glamour but alas, the talk was in a slightly less impressive room at the top of the theatre. However the good news was that my talk had a fairly impressive score with the music from the auditions that were being held booming in the background!
The talk was organised by New Writing South and went well I think. I enjoyed it anyway and I hope it was useful. I handed out some brief notes at the end of the session and thought I would post extracts from them here on the blog. Here's a note on covers.
Should you Judge a Book by its Cover?
Hell, yes!
The cover is the first thing your friend, family or customer will see so you really want to dress to impress. Please, please, please pay someone to design your cover. Do not get a friend of a friend who did technical drawing at college to do it. Commercial publishers engage specialists to do this – so should you. I can’t emphasise this enough.
When you engage a designer, don’t expect them to read your book (although some might). You should provide a cover brief which gives them a taste of the book and ideally give them an idea of other books that your book is similar to. Some people criticise the publisher habit of creating very similar covers for similar books but if your book is the next da Vinci Code why not make it look like it. It will sell more copies.
There's another talk in Brighton on 10 November. Do come along!
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