Cover Designing

Seriously this part of publishing a book is hell...

At some point in the near, too distant, is there a future? I'll be publishing a book on Lulu publishing http://www.lulu.com/

The hard part isn't the formatting, it's not converting to a PDF, it's not selecting the font, it's not looking for grammatical errors. No, the hell is designing a cover that doesn't look like something that junior would scribble in kindergarten while hyperventilating on red cordial. So far I've come up with twelve different covers trying to either capture the essence of the book, or at the very least not look like a Rorschach blob.

The book took a month to write, but the cover has already breached that period. It's evil. Having no artist ability requires tracking down royalty free images, editing them, shaping resizing, hacking, putting them through the blender and once all that's done I start all over again as I can't stand the result.  And on top of all that, I'm a bit colour blind, so I have no real idea if its working. Is Green a bad colour for a spaceship?

And please don't tell me I should use a commercial editor.  They cost money, the real stuff, the very fabric of time and space is modeled using money ... or maybe that's one of my Scottish ancestors talking.

Yet in a limited sense ... it is fun, limited in the way Hunnic Hordes felt about their borders when they swept into Eastern Europe on a weekend pass.

It it now two days later and I'm rewriting everything... I've decided the Title: Spacemarine Jones is too similar to Space Marines (Warhammer 40000), although they are quite distinct in their concept. To find a new name took hours of searching, you wouldn't believe the number of books, comics, cartoons, movies that have Space Marine in them, or some variant. Space Cadet, Space Trooper, Colonial Marines, Imperial Marines, Royal Manticoran Marine Corps, Earth Force Marine Corps, Star Marines, etc. All with powered armour exoskeleton and some variant of energy weapon. Which on reflection isn't that surprising given their descent from E.E. Doc Smith.

This means, I'm also going back through the blog entries and retroactively inserting High Marines for Spacemarines. Sigh, will the editing never stop?

So, new name Highmarine Jones or High Marine Jones, and in the back of my head I'm thinking I should change Jones to Smith, after E.E. Doc Smith, thank the gods of computing for giving us the REPLACE function in word processors.

Actually after a few minutes, High Marines or Highmarines has grown on me - time to publish!

Three days later... feck! Still haven't published, can't decide which Print On Demand publisher. Really I'm trying to find the one with the largest coverage. I'm not expecting success or even a large audience, more of a showcase book to show I can write.

Perhaps I should "Publish and be Damned". Of course, that quote is originally due to Duke of Wellington,  when John Joseph Stockdale sort to embarrass Wellington over his mistress, which does take away the sting of using this as a quote encouraging yourself to publish.


Hmmm...another three days have passed, although you wouldn't think from the way I concatenate the posts together, and I've been looking at Lulu and Comparing it with CreateSpace. Not good, on the website http://www.complaintsboard.com/ I've counted over a hundred complaints about Lulu but only one complaint for CreateSpace. Bother, this means I have redesign everything. No wonder publishers are paid so much, it never ends. So now I'm going with CreateSpace.