Lesson 15

Writing Class 101 by Rick Kurtis
 Book Cover; Lesson 15
 Welcome back to writing class 101. I hope your time was well spent working on your book and you’re ready for a little more information. Today I want to talk about a book cover, the front, the back, and the spine.

Using vanity publishing companies, I had a problem when it came time for the companies to find me a cover picture, and I had to go around and around, even when I already had my own picture. My professor in college told me that her publisher sent her the same picture that was on a book that she already owned. The only difference was the title.
I had an idea or concept for my book, ‘Little Lost Girl,’ which was a little blonde girl, see-through glow, standing in a swamp on top of the water. The sun was high and the rays from the sunlight shone down upon her. Pretty simple and straightforward, so I thought. They came back with a little girl standing in the water in a mountain lake, and the font looked terrible with a double G. They changed the font after I found one in my Word program that I liked, and when I told them it was a swamp in the South, they cropped out the mountains, but they were still reflecting in the water. I had to go online and find a scene pic of a swamp for them. It wasn’t hard to find three pictures on the first five pages out of hundreds. I had to tell them again what my vision entailed, and now you can see how it turned out. I won’t even get into the other books and publishers.
If you do use anybody to make you a cover, give them as much detail as possible, even a stick figure drawing if need be, or find a pic and send it along with a font choice. Make sure that you can get at least three revisions, and when it comes back, check it over with a fine tooth comb.
I know you are super excited to see your very own cover, but you may be blinded. My first book, Day of the Cross, sending them my own picture and concept with the title at the top, which I thought looked great. They changed it up with a different font and put the title at the bottom. I loved it. I didn’t even notice the line square around the title, and they didn’t put a little tiny Jesus with his loving hands extended in the center of the cross. You can’t always get what you want. Hey, that sounds like a song.
On my fourth book, Daniel Peters, I gave them basically an open concept of what I wanted. They did such a wonderful job that I signed off on the cover so it could go to print, and when I received my free copies, I noticed that They put the wrong name on the plane. Being that I signed off on the cover, that one mistake cost me to pull the book and to redo. I had to research my emails in order to show them that it was Their mistake made by Them. Still, it took three more weeks to change.
So, show it to everyone, and have them check it out. Ask them to really look at it, not just say, “Oh, it’s a nice cover.” Tell them the whole concept and have them look for mistakes in the title or the picture. Get their honest opinion. Make sure the title is clearly visible. I see a lot of books where the title blends in with the background.
Let’s move on to the back cover. You will notice that they are all different. If you have a picture, make sure all the words can be seen and read easily. If you don’t have a picture, use a nice soft color. Make sure that the barcode and ISBN is one inch away from the center spine in the bottom right corner. Keep a one inch margin for your book description and for bleed room. If you have your book done by someone, they should know all of this. If not, how do you figure out the spine thickness and what is bleed?
The spine is the middle, where all the pages come together. It depends on how many pages are bound together. A lot of companies want to print a half page size book which is relatively six by nine. This is a great size for novels with 80,000 words or more, 260 pages. With that many pages, the spine is about half-inch thick. Not so great with 24,000 words, or eighty pages. It’s thinner than a pencil. It doesn’t even feel like a book.
I used to have a formula, but it has been lost through a sea of papers. There are plenty of sites on the Internet that will help you to determine the size by the number of pages times by 400. Amazon uses a formula of page times .0025 or .00235 depending on the type of paper used. Something like that, anyway. There are also charts and guides that will help you to center your spine and making it the right size for paperback or hard cover. If your book is under 100 pages, many will not bother to place the title in the spine.
 A hard cover has that indent crimp, which takes up another half inch of space, ergo the ISBN set away from the center.
Bleed is very important. It’s an extra amount of the picture that hangs over the edge of the book so you don’t have a white edge. It is also used for trim size. The picture needs to be a half-inch bigger than your book cover, that’s one quarter inch on all sides. If you have a hardcover, the print can wrap around the edges to the inside. Make sure that your words, title, and main picture does not flow past the end of the book, or it may get cut off, or folded over. Keep your title and words far away from the edges so not to lose them, and away from the spine for when you have a hardcover that has an indented crimp. This will take up another half-inch to bend down into the fold. You don’t want the ISBN or your words written on the back to be sunk in the fold.
Remember, when doing this by yourself, you start with the back cover on the left, spine width in the middle, and then the front cover on the right. Open up a book and lay it out on the table and you will see what I mean. There are plenty of sites and You-tube videos that can help run you through the process.
I like to make my very own book with my printer. I use twelve font or fourteen, single space, book fold, which is set to landscape, and print on both sides, short edge. When the book is printed out, 100 pages turns out to twenty-five sheets of paper. This I can staple in the middle and fold in half. More pages than that, I cut the pages in half and glue them together. This gives me my thickness, and how the book will look and sized as a six by nine. If you want a thicker book, they do have options for smaller sizes. Amazon likes to use the five by eight size, where others all want to use the six by nine, so I have been told, but amazon’s main set up is a 6 by 9. I guess no one uses the three by five pocket novels anymore.
Until next time, have fun and
 
Happy Writing from rickkurtisbooks.com