Book Cover Created for C.M. Simpson's 365 Days of Flash Fiction

This is one of the simplest covers I've ever done. I have to admit to wanting to be able to tilt the words and phrases, but Gimp was feeling particularly uncooperative on that matter (either refusing to turn the whole layer, or rendering the writing illegible), so when I work it out, I'll let you know. In the meantime, here is the cover for C.M.'s October release.

This cover uses part of a single photograph by Positiveflash at Dreamstime.

365 Days of Flash Fiction is scheduled for an October 4, 2014 release, with pre-ordering from early September 2014.

Book Cover Creation for C.M. Simpson

The second cover completed for C.M. Simpson Publishing this month. It took a lot of fiddling before I was anywhere near happy with this one, because it seemed that, no matter what I did, I would not get the 'Stiletto' picture to sit along the edge of the knight's blade). The Gimp eraser did not work to take out the edge of the image, and rotating using the tool box did not shift it (it left a pale strip where the photo used to be or a dark stripe where it overlapped the lighter area). Remind me to talk about the differences between rotating using the toolbox and the 'Layer' drop down some time. It took a bit of fiddling but the result was what you see below.

Photography credits are below. Again, all manipulation or mis-manipulation is my own.

Cover Photography © 2013 Greta van der Rol

Cover Photography © 2012 Mitrofan28 at Dreamstimne

Cover Photography © 2013 Martinmark at Dreamstime

Cover Photography © 2013 Vladimirs Poplavskis at Dreamstime

Cover Photography © 2013 Tamara Bauer at Dreamstime

Cover Design © 26 April 2014 C.M. Simpson

The Year Just Gone is scheduled for release on 28 June 2014.

Book Cover Created for C.M. Simpson

Every year, C.M. Simpson collects all the works she completed in the previous year and releases them in June. This year, she is releasing two volumes. Last year, she used the covers of the four anthologies to create the cover for that collection. This year, there were no collections, but there were a lot of individual works, and the collection ended up being two volumes long.

I searched high and low for two photographs that might connect the two volumes, and settled on a pair of sunrise and sunset photographs that would do the trick - as long as I did not bury them too deeply in the other elements. These two photographs would form my backgrounds.

The foreground would consist of the title, by-line and elements taken from the covers of short stories to be incorporated in each volume. When I had a look at these, I realized there were too many for each book to be represented, so I took a small selection and added them in.

The first cover had the sunrise photograph as the background. This was taken by Greta van der Rol, and my only regret was that I could not use it as a whole, or make it the centre piece. The background on the cover does it no justice. Check it out; you'll see what I mean.

The covers I had to select elements from were as follows:

 

These were all short stories released individually last year, and now collected in the annual work release. I couldn't take elements from them all, but you can see which ones were chosen. I still find the cover  a little "busy", but the genres covered are well represented, and the mixture of genre is clearly portrayed.

The white-letter branding provided a couple of challenges, which were answered using Gimp's Hue Saturation tool, and I'll do a separate post on that. Except for the background, all artwork and photography for the different elements was sourced at Dreamstime, and artists and photographers represented here are as follows:

Beach background © 2014 Greta van der Rol

Flying pigs © 2013 Rechitan Sorin at Dreamstime

Fairy © 2013 Algol at Dreamstime

Ground pig © 2013 Yuriy Zelenen’kyy at Dreamstime

Fire © 2013 Surassawadee at Dreamstime

Techno-head © 2013 Lightslab at Dreamstime

All manipulation, or mis-manipulation, is mine.