Choose Your Friends Carefully

What I mean by that is, if at all possible, during your formative years, become friends with someone who, a few decades later will offer to design your ebook cover as a personal favor. Make sure this person is someone who displays very little aptitude or passion for graphic design at the time, but through hard work and dedication miraculously transforms into a visionary artist and Photoshopper par excellence.

Well, that's what I did, anyway, and look what it got me.

I'm posting a larger cover of my debut novel Ring of Fire here, mainly to give it a place to live so I can send out links. My designer--the multi-talented Mike Sottong--worked with my crude notions of a concept and created what you see here. The plot of Ring of Fire involves a nefarious (and occasionally hilarious) scheme to monitor college student's purchase habits--using hidden cameras--and then exploit them. Where are the cameras? Based on this cover, where do you think? The basis of the ring on the cover was Mike's (and my) actual class ring, from the now-defunct Robert E. Peary High School in Rockville, Maryland.

There are conflicting opinions on whether ebooks even need covers, or if a cover makes a difference. That's a topic for another blog post. However, I'm also making Ring of Fire available as a paperback, and paperbacks need covers. Shamefully, I do judge books by their covers, and I wanted mine to look professional. First impressions and all.

Should you desire a cover for your ebook/paperback, Mike has graciously offered to work with select indie authors at a greatly reduced rate (possibly for free, depending on the terms). Just let me know and I'll hook you up.