Choosing My Book Cover
This is one of the most important parts of the entire process in my mind. If the cover does not grab the audiences attention, it will be very difficult to drive people to order or purchase a copy. Now, once the Final Art for the each page has been created it was time to consider what the cover would look like.
So, the plan for choosing my cover came in three parts: Cover Art, Branding, & and Page Design…
PART ONE: Choosing Cover Art
Based on our agreement, my illustrator was asked to create 3 separate options for the front and back of our cover page. The illustrations would likely have some elements from inside the book to maintain continuity with the story and the characters. Here are the three wonderful options that I was presented with. Option 1 was a full color spread with the entire scene illustrated, Option 2 was a half-spread and Option 3 included an all blue background. Which one do you like?
Because I prefer to get more of a consensus when it comes to big decisions regarding the book, I reached out my support group of friends and colleagues to help me decide which cover looks the best. The good news is that the voting was so overwhelming lopsided to Option 1, it made it easy to choose it for the cover. Of the 69 people who voted (myself included), 62 of them chose the full color spread!! That is almost 90% of the votes!! No brainer, right?!
PART TWO: Branding the Title
From the beginning, I had always imagined that The Adventures of Wembly the Pug would be a series and as a result, it became even more necessary to create title that would resonate and be recognizable over the years. Since this is going to be the brand of Wembly, it was my hope to find a title that represented the childlike energy of Wembly and would be something children and their parents would relate to. So, it was really exciting when my illustrator shared her vision and my book designer approved it after pretty much the first attempt. You can see version one is up above and the final version is below. I LOVE IT!
PART THREE: Page Design
With the front and back cover illustrations chosen and the brand of the title decided, the last thing was to design where are the words are going to go on the illustration. There is a lot that goes into creating the page design for a cover, much more than I originally thought. So, it is very fortunate that I hired a great book designer to help me shape where the Story Title, Book Description, ISBN, positioning of the characters on the pages, and even the credits to author and illustrator go!
What a fun process to see this cover take shape. Thank you to both my illustrator and book designer for helping to make it so enjoyable and educational!
Go Wembly go!