The Story About The Cover Of Death On Highway 13

                                                             

                                 

Now, I'm the kind of person who usually doesn't dole out advice unless specifically asked. It's just my nature. However, these days with the proliferation of  E books being put out by aspiring writers I would like to offer one piece of hopefully sage council: it's about the cover of your book. The cover is the first thing prospective readers will see, so you should present the kind of artwork that immediately catches a persons eye and draws them in. If you have an anemic looking cover the reader may look elsewhere . In my opinion, the cover is the door, the book itself is the inside of the room. A writers job is to get the reader into that room and tell them your story.  

Some  E book  publishing companies offer to provide you with a cover, for a fee, and they use a company called Think Stock that has templates. These self publishing companies will simply choose the template that comes closest to matching the title of your book and Voila!, you've got a cover. Many times the poor author is stuck with a lackluster cover. The person looking at it will probably think, "Meh. Not worth it."

When I wrote Death On Highway 13, I envisioned the cover as described in the prolog as a truck driving away leaving a dead body in the street. The corpse resembles a child's doll after the kid had tired of it and has thrown the doll away; crumpled up with wide, staring eyes. You might be thinking, " That sounds like a good idea. Joe should draw it himself."

However there was one teensy-weensy problem: I can't draw to save my life. In fact, my high school art teacher once wrote on my report card: Joe has a lot of imagination, but little to no artistic ability. Ouch! So the hunt was on to find an artist to bring my vision to life. The ones I contacted were rather expensive and I simply did not have the funds to pay them for their work. 

I did make the acquaintance of a woman who claimed to be a talented artist and would draw my cover for $400.00. I made the huge, walrus sized mistake of giving her the money first. One day, the so-called artist dropped by my house to show me what she had done so far. It was awful. It was amateurish. She claimed it was just a rough painting and that she was getting ready to put the finishing touches which would look wonderful. Stupidly enough, I didn't know where this woman lived. All I had was a phone number. I blindly trusted her. When I called her to find out when my cover would be delivered, all I got was: This person's voice mail box is full and is unable to receive any calls. For about a month I called the number she gave me and always got the same answer. So I got zip, zilch, nada, zero for my money. Four hundred dollars down the drain. If I remembered the name of this woman, I'd tell everyone across the web to avoid this con artist at all costs.

So, back to square one. In the meantime, I discovered a website  called  Fiverr where you can find artists. Luckily for me I found an artist named Chiara Noemi Monaco from Italy. This time, I paid $180.00 and she asked me what I wanted. I described the cover I had in my mind. When she showed me the finished product, I damn near had a hundred heart attacks and at my age that's not a good thing. Of course, I exaggerate mightily, but that's how much I loved Chiara's illustration. She took my vision and added in her own creativity. 

Remember, the first thing that commands a potential readers attention is a killer cover. It draws and hopefully, rivets their attention to your novel. From that point on, your words and story telling ability do the rest.  When you get right down to it, it's really up to you, the self published author, to promote your novel to the world at large.