In this day and age of Amazon and Barnes & Noble website sales where the cover is the very FIRST thing people see, a professionally-designed custom cover is more important than ever before. That’s the cover option we recommend and that’s the cover option I chose for Fandemonium Volume 2, which is the book I’m publishing personally for the purposes of this walk-thru, but if you’re still not convinced, here’s a short video:
So once you choose the custom cover selection, you see this page, which is the detail page for the Custom Cover option:
This is where you start to supply some real information about your book that will be used for the actual production, publishing, and distribution process. As such, it is important to be thoughtful and careful when entering this information. It’s best to run everything through a spell check (even your name!) so I recommend you compose the answers to every field in a word processor so your spelling and grammar are checked, and then cut and paste into each respective field on this page. You should also save that Word document for reference later; it’ll help you to have access to it when you need to provide your distribution annotation later in the process.
Actually, this page is a longer than what is shown above, (which is why that image of a light-bulb is cut off), but you get the idea. Everything about your cover is asked on this screen, which is also a lot of pertinent information about the book in general, like its title, sub-title, author byline, synopsis, etc.
Since this is a custom cover design, there are also fields asking for your ideas or input as to what sort of cover you want. Every custom cover design delivers two different concepts based upon your instructions so you can pick the one you like the best. And for some authors, perhaps you know you want a custom cover but you don’t know of what. That’s okay. We offer a choice here where you can leave the entire design up to your designer (of course, in that case, you’re going to be asked to accept one of the 2 designs you receive; after all, how picky can you be when you didn’t provide any direction?)
As far as Fandemonium Volume 2 is concerned, I already know I want it to be a “green” version of our first Fandemonium book (which was blue), with a “volume 2” in yellow script writing just under the title. So this custom cover is relatively easy for me to describe. I enter all the details for the cover and add my custom cover option to my shopping cart by clicking the ADD TO CART button.
What’s next…?
President of Outskirts Press 