They do judge a book by its cover.

While I've gotten some pretty good reviews for my novel, in a sense validating my ability as a writer, at least in my mind, one problem I've always had with the finished product was the cover. I was never really happy with it. I've always felt that was the biggest obstacle to sales, that and my inability to market effectively.

Honestly, look at it, does that inspire you to part with twelve of your hard earned dollars?

While preparing to publish I looked into how much it would cost to have a cover done professionally and was shocked by the prices I ran across. They ranged anywhere from $600.00 on down, with the quality of the portfolio matching the asking price of the artist. Lets face it, your brother -in-law might be able to make you a cover for twenty bucks, but would it have the same quality as a cover from say Jeroen Ten Bergee who has designed covers for traditional and self publishers? Probably not.


So with the approaching holiday season, yes Halloween is a very important holiday in my book, I wanted a cover that would pop, that would inspire the average reader of dark fiction to take a peek beyond their first impression of my offering.

My biggest problem right now is money. I don't have any, and with my current employment picture I don't anticipate having any for some time. So I spent the past month and a half pursuing photoshop tutorials and experimenting with the program. In the end this is what I came up with.

I'm now happy with the cover for my book and am in the process of updating it across the web.  But a very important lesson I've learned and one I hope to impart is don't get in a hurry getting your work out there. Take your time, spend the money on a decent cover, as well as editing (it's one thing I did do right at least) and formatting if necessary. If you don't have the money, or you've spent what you have for editing, then you may have to follow my path and learn how to use any one of the design programs out there, some of which are free.

Even though we may have been brought up to believe otherwise. People do judge a book by its cover.