Nova Scotia Mystery

So, between drawing my Yard Birds, I’ve been working on updating the covers for the Nova Scotia Birder Mysteries. After completing a revamp of the Thompson Nottingham series (see Where Have You BEEN?) we were so pleased with the more ‘professional’ look for the series, and how it now looked like a series, that we were determined to do the same for the NS mysteries, which actually had very disparate covers.

Still, I was at something of a loss for a linking theme-birds, of course, would feature but what else? For the Nottingham books I’d used (mainly) Nottingham scenes, suitably manipulated, and added part of the original hand-drawn cover pictures.

The NS books didn’t have the hand-drawn covers (although there were drawings inside), so what to do to make the covers recognisable? It didn’t click until Mark suggested lighthouses as the theme-NS is famous for its lighthouses, after all; there are said to be 160 of them, more than any other province. Not only that, I was pretty certain that I could find a good number of lighthouse photos in my photo files. It was the inspiration I needed. He also said that he’d rather like the books to be blue in hue, rather than the multicoloured tones of the Thompson series. Good, I could work with that!

Now the issue with book covers is that the ‘interesting bit’ has to be on the right-hand side of the photo, so that it appears on the front of the book! So some of the photos I had needed to be manipulated a bit, or even reversed totally. Sometimes the lighthouses were in the wrong place, surrounded by ancillary structures, or too small. A bit of Photoshop magic sorted that out. Also birds were needed, something that we are not short of photos of round here, so I was able to pick out suitable species from Mark’s photos, cut them out and convert them to PNG files so that they could be inserted into the cover photo. That technique, which I learnt to do only this year, has been a revelation!

I wanted the birds to be ‘true colour’, so I couldn’t insert them until I’d colourised the background picture in Photoshop Elements, using ‘enhance’, ‘adjust color’ and then ‘adjust color/saturation’. Then, clicking the ‘colorize’ button and using the ‘Hue’ slider to get the right colour for the whole picture. followed by choosing ‘adjust color curves’ and then choosing ‘increase contrast’ gave me the colour and sparkle I was looking for. Putting the photo back into PagePlus, I could then add the birds and the text as wanted. I was liking the look.

For the first in the series, ‘The Frigatebird, I decided to use a picture of mine of our local lighthouse, the Cape Light. I took the photo from The Hawk so it was a long way away and not entirely sharp but I liked the effect. I found a Magnificent Frigatebird photo of Mark’s (from Venezuela, no less) and isolated the bird. I chose a mixture of Times New Roman and Basic Sans Heavy SF fonts for the titles, author name and blurb. I was pretty happy with the result.

Now to set up the other books.

For ‘Nor’easter’, I didn’t have a photo that really gave the impression of a stormy sea, especially not with a lighthouse in the right place. I’d clearly have to improvise. This was the only cover where I had to resort to a Pixabay image for the main picture. I did decide to add an offshore lighthouse, this time one of my own photos, of a lighthouse near Canso, which I wanted to have in the photo before I went ahead with the colourising process. The birds, Great Shearwaters and a South Polar Skua, were all taken from Mark’s photos.

The final cover might well be my favourite one of the four.

For ‘Sea Glass’, with its theme of Piping Plover beaches, the plovers were an obvious bird subject (and Mark has plenty of photos) but I needed a beach scene, preferably with a lighthouse. I had a photo, of The Hawk beach here on Cape Sable Island, and there is a lighthouse in it, but it was a very small image. Still, that didn’t matter because I could add in a bigger image, taken from another photo of the Cape Light. It is a Piping Plover Beach, too, although the birds are not actually to scale!

For ‘The Collector’ we didn’t have a particular site in mind, so I chose a good lighthouse, the Boar’s Head lighthouse on Long Island, as taken from the Petit Passage Whale Watch boat. I thought I could use the Painted Bunting (Mark’s photo) that was on the original cover and looked for a better set of crosshairs-I’m embarrassed to say that the last cover involved me drawing and cutting out the crosshairs, sticking them to an actual photo of the bunting and then scanning the whole thing! We’ve come on a bit since then. I found a PNG image of crosshairs on Pixabay, and they worked very well. Yet again, the bird is not to scale and isn’t meant to be!

So we went ahead and re-published all four books, and our copies of the paperbacks arrived here, today-we have to buy our own copies, even though Mark is the author. I have to say we were jolly excited and very pleased with the result. They do look very much like a series now, and any further books will follow the convention (I’ve already started putting together the cover for book 5, ‘The Final Tick’, and it has a lighthouse, a bird and is blue!). The new paperbacks took their place on our ‘self-published’ bookshelf, 34 books and counting. It’s looking pretty impressive, at least I think so!

All of Mark’s books, and the travelogues we wrote together, are available as paperback and ebook, from Amazon.

Where Have You BEEN?

I’ve been busy for a little while, so busy that I’ve not had time to draw anything much. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been being creative-well, at least I think it’s creative 🙂

As I have mentioned before, Mark writes books, and I usually get involved in the editing, illustration and cover design aspects of our self-publishing empire. Well, when I say ‘our’, I guess it really is Amazon’s, but at least they make publishing relatively simple. Nowadays, after 30 books, we’ve got the publishing side down to a fine art, with the ebooks generally being available just a few minutes after clicking the ‘publish’ button-the paperback version generally takes a little longer but there is rarely an issue with that, either. It was not always thus.

The last book that Mark published was ‘Wet Bones’, number 4 in the D.I.Thompson Nottingham Mystery Series. For these books I have been doing a cover drawing of something that seemed relevant, the last one being ‘Clarence Wetbones’ (see Clarence Wetbones). The cover text fonts. colours and placements for each book were unique to that book. It didn’t shout ‘series’, did it.

The Nottingham Series Book Covers

We were talking about this and thought that it might work better to have a themed set of covers. I’m a big reader of UK crime fiction and have many examples of series published by ‘proper’ publishers. Generally, it involves a photo cover, either monochrome or in moody colours, with the author name and title in the same font throughout the series-clearly we were not following that convention, here!

Mark already had the fifth book in the series, ‘Lamb’s Tail’, nearly ready to go, so I thought I’d have a go at updating the whole series in time for the next installment. I had already done a cover illustration, of a lamb, expecting this to have the drawn cover (see Bah, Lamb), but it didn’t make sense to go ahead with that now that we’d decided on a change. First thing, first, I had to source some suitable ‘moody’ photos.

As I mentioned, this series is set in the city of Nottingham in the UK, home of Robin Hood, etc., and Mark’s home town. You’d think, therefore, that we’d have lots of photos of the place but not so. It’s always the same, you don’t tend to photograph the place you live. Also, we really only got into digital photography after we left so what we do have would be prints and probably lacking the quality needed for a book cover. I did have a few photos of Colwick Park from a previous trip back to the UK, and the ‘wet bones’ of the fourth book were found there, so maybe that would work.

Colwick Park Lake-Sandra Dennis

Ok, fairly moody but was it moody enough? And what about the rest of the books? Well, I thought I’d take a look on Pixabay for free, copyright-free photos of Nottingham and was delighted to find some!

A street scene

Highfields Lake

Clock tower, Victoria Centre

Again, not exactly moody but I thought I could do something with them. I did need one more picture, really of open marshy country, and there wasn’t anything suitable in the Nottingham file, but the picture below was under ‘marsh’. It doesn’t really resemble the country around the city, but there’s such a thing as poetic licence!

Now for the moody. I thought I’d import the photos into Photoshop Elements and see what I could fiddle with. I found the Hue/Saturation setting most useful for adding drama. For example, I’d decided to use the street scene for ‘Coldhearted’ and so wanted a blue tinge added. The marsh photo would be for ‘On The Fly’ and for that I whacked up the red hues. The clock tower would do for ‘Spiked’ but I wasn’t sure what would work, so I fiddled with the settings until I got an otherworldly, mainly green/red and saturated hue. The Colwick Lake was for ‘Wet Bones’, and took on a pinky-purple tone, whilst Highfields was perfect for ‘Lamb’s Tail’, because it features in the text. This also got the purple treatment. The final stage was the ‘solarize’ button, which gave each photo a weird glow that I liked.

So far, so good, but I wanted to add something that made these pictures unique to this series, and I also wanted to link the new covers to the old ones. I decided to apply some part of the old drawn covers to the new cover picture. Now, I have a confession, I only just learned how to ‘cut out’ part of a photo and apply it to another picture, in Photoshop! I’ve been using the thing for years and never knew how-I’ve even been known to cut things out, stick them on a physical copy and then scan it (shakes head, mournfully). Armed with this new knowledge, I decided to use the photoframe from ‘Coldhearted’, the body from ‘On The Fly’ (reversed), one hand and the ball from ‘Spiked’ (again reversed), old Clarence from “Wet Bones’ and the lamb for ‘Lamb’s Tail’. Then it was just a matter of choosing a suitable font, colour and placement for the cover text- I chose a no nonsense font called Industrial 736 BT for titles and author, the title in bright scarlet, and Bahnschrift semi-bold for the back blurb- and then updating all of the interior texts to share the same format, font and layout and the job was a good ‘un.

I said that our technique for publishing had changed. When we first started texts were uploaded to Kindle KDP as word documents, with JPEG cover files. That’s what we did for the first three books in this series and we used to get all sorts of issues, especially in the ebooks, with things moving around. Now we’ve learned better and the paperback texts are uploaded as PDFs, as are the paperback covers. Since doing that we’ve had no issues. The ebook version text is now uploaded as a EPUB file (I convert using a free program called Calibre) and only the cover is a JPEG. Things moving about in the body of the book are a thing of the past and the uploaded files are accepted almost immediately. Life is so much easier.

So Mark published his latest book, ‘Lamb’s Tail’, earlier today and the ebook is already available (at the hefty price of 99c CDN), the paperback will take a little longer (and be rather pricier). We aslo updated all of the other four books, with new covers and reformatted texts. I’m rather pleased with the new look.

I’m off the hook, for a while, with the next book likely to be a few weeks off, so I think I’ll have time for a bit of drawing.

Galaxy Quest

Mark is writing another book. Well, in truth he’s writing about 10! He has one ‘The Elementals’ in review just at the moment-its a sequel to ‘The Harvesters’, a Sci-Fi/fantasy novel. You might remember that I did two covers for ‘The Harvesters’, both of which he liked but they didn’t really give quite the impression he wanted (see Harvest, Harvested and Second Harvest). Anyhow, I’m no use at drawing galaxies, which is what he wanted to try next, so I took a look on Pixabay for some photos and found quite a number. Pixabay photos used here are Royalty- and copyright-free, so they are fine to use for such a purpose.

Lots of options there, but I didn’t want to just use a straight photo-that would be too easy! When I found the photo below, I had the germ of an idea:

This image seemed to fit rather well with the ‘Harvesting’ idea, only instead of harvesting crops, we are harvesting people and planets. So I would try and incorporate this image into one of the other photos, using the magic of Photoshop. We have a very old version of Photoshop Elements, which is a workhorse for us.

As for the actual cover photo, there was a few things I was looking for. It would definitely make things easier if the colour of the background image and the ‘hand’ image were similar. Secondly, I rather wanted a focal image, not just a field of stars. Thirdly, the image would need to extend far enough to wrap around the paperback and extend onto the back cover, but not be overly fussy so that it would be difficult to read the text on the back. I rather thought that this image would fit the job.

Lots of interesting light from that flare, an interesting moon as a focal point and plenty of fairly plain area to wrap around, unfortunately on the wrong side! Not a problem, I’d flip the image.

Now, using my even more ancient publishing software (PagePlus), I could superimpose the ‘hand’ onto the lower right hand side of the image, making it slightly transparent, and then go back into Photoshop to merge the edges in, using the only way I know how-the clone stamp tool at a very small size. It’s fiddly, but I was very, very happy with the result. More importantly, so was Mark!

Now all that I had to do was add the text. I chose to use a classic font, Times New Roman, rather than the futuristic-looking thing I’d used last time. It worked.

We were so proud when the updated paperback and e-book were re-published and a shiny new cover joined the other books on our ‘self-published’ bookshelf.

Still, no time to rest on any laurels because book 2 in the ‘Harvesters’ Galaxy’ is close to publishing so a second cover is needed. I wanted to keep the ‘hand’ image for ‘The Elementals’-a sort of theme, I suppose- so similar issues were the driving force in the choice of the main image. In face I chose a much darker photo:

I really liked the streams of light in the foreground, although I would need to reposition the photo so that the moon was not so central and would land nicely on the front cover. For the hand, I didn’t want to hide any of that other-worldly landscape in the foreground so I chose to invert the image and have it descending from the top. Perhaps it looks a bit like someone bouncing a ball, but I thought it an appropriate suggestion for the Elementals, who are playing with the human race-a theme in the book. Again, a slightly transparent ‘hand’ image and a lot of work with the old clone stamp got it somewhere close to what I was envisioning.

The same text font ended up with this (note that the back cover blurb hasn’t been finalized yet):

Again, Mark was pretty happy with this. Now all he has to do is get a final version ready for upload!

Anyhow, he’s apparently already got plans (and some text) for book 3 in this series. looks like I shall have to manipulate the hand again, soon.

‘The Harvesters’, the first in the ‘Harvesters’ Galaxy’ series, is now available from Amazon as an kindle e-book or a paperback. ‘The Elementals’, the second in the series, will be available soon from the same source and in the same formats.