Judging a Book Publisher By Its Cover Designer

I’m getting ready to work with the cover designer employed by my publisher for the seventh time. There are myriad financial aspects to why I decided to continue self-publishing my Other Worldly series with BookLocker, but the best reason is working with their designer, Todd Engel, to keep a bit of consistency in the look of my novels. And, most importantly, because a coveted level of trust and understanding was established through the past four years and six book covers.

This is apparently unheard of in the traditional publishing world. Why am I not surprised?

I recently discovered this reality about book cover designs through an online Writer’s Digest article by Norah Woodsey, “Why I Choose to Self-Publish,” in which Woodsey said, “I have never met a traditionally published author who worked with their cover designer. Some don’t even learn what the cover is until the publisher posts it on social media. The authors were not informed as respected stakeholders, let alone allowed to voice opinions or make decisions.”

This explains why I have consistently found book covers of favorite series to be absolutely awful. The weird cartoonish look of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels come to mind, as well as the garishly neon yet unimaginatively boring covers of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum by-the-numbers series. Both deserve better.

Woodsey also said that her path to self-publishing is “…an attempt at simplicity. Rather than a team of strangers tackling each task independently.” I relate to this on several levels.

Is there a team of strangers at BookLocker? Yes, but no. There is a handful of individuals who have pretty much remained the same in nearly five years, but of course I don’t know them personally and I interact with them only via online messages through the publisher’s website. But perhaps because I’ve done this process many times now, the interaction doesn’t seem impersonal.

Even better, when it comes to the cover design, the discourse occurs one-on-one via personal email. As an author, you can’t get much more hands on than that.

Here’s how it works for me. I email cover designer Todd various pre-selected royalty-free images, usually from Pixabay but some from Unsplash. Both are sites that also offer images for sale in addition to free media. Due to various other expenses involved in self-publishing, I’ve never gone the original art route for book cover designs, and yet I’ve still obtained one-of-a-kind, creative covers through working with Todd at BookLocker.

Todd takes my ideas conjured through photos and/or other created images and puts them together with cool text fonts to create Other Worldly magic. He’s also found images himself that ultimately worked better. Sometimes he wraps an image from the front to the back covers. Occasionally he gets really inventive and overlaps images in a way I would have thought was technologically impossible.

That’s what I’m hoping Todd can do this time around for the cover of Aliens Watch. The image accompanying this blog post depicts a bright (alien) green spiral of a lime peel. And though it ultimately might not work—I have one other less challenging day-glow lime image on standby—I’m hoping Todd will be able to merge a small version of this lime spiral with a larger image of Saturn and its rings.

Saturn and limes may sound like a wackadoodle combination, but those who read my Other Worldly novels will understand. Because Saturn is actually Cultura, the agricultural planet, and protagonist Rowan Layne has a fondness for citrus. Plus, I wasn’t sure a ginormous hot-pink opossum would work on the cover, even if I could somehow find a photo of one. Am I kidding? You have to read Aliens Watch to find out. 😊

Hence, the thing that renders a few of my book covers especially original is how they reflect the content of that particular novel. For example, Todd has already combined the reflective surface of an iridescent beetle with a Luna moth for the cover of book two, Feeling Alienated. Then there’s the hummingbird that looks as if it were sipping from flowers, which are actually gemstone crystals appearing on what looks like a planet, once Todd got done with the cover of Alien Sensation, book five. Most recently last year, he managed to place a  lavender cartoonish depiction of a dolphin to look as if it were swimming in swirls of an actual psychedelic photo of a space vortex for Altogether Alien.

We’ll see what happens this time around for Aliens Watch, coming in January. One thing I’m certain of is a traditional publisher would eschew photos of my critters, Bodie dog and Morris the kitty who star as themselves in the Other Worldly novels, in place of an actual author photo on the back cover. I especially like the pic I’ve chosen this time around, and I suspect Todd will too.