Episode 019 - Judging a Book by Its Cover with Jane Gorman
March 25, 2020
Jane Gorman, author of the Adam Kaminski mystery series, and I discuss two primary components of a successful book cover--the cover image and the title--and provide best practices and advice on avoiding common pitfalls. Jane Gorman was born in Canada to an English father and Polish mother. The family moved to the United States only a few years later, where Jane grew up in Cherry Hill, NJ. Jane worked briefly in academics after completing a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology, then became a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State.
After settling down with a job in the National Park Service, Jane turned her pen to subjects long near to her heart: murder and mystery. Her first novel, A BLIND EYE, is set in Poland. Later novels in the series send Detective Adam Kaminski to Washington, DC, Philadelphia and Galway. Jane lives in Cherry Hill with her husband.
After settling down with a job in the National Park Service, Jane turned her pen to subjects long near to her heart: murder and mystery. Her first novel, A BLIND EYE, is set in Poland. Later novels in the series send Detective Adam Kaminski to Washington, DC, Philadelphia and Galway. Jane lives in Cherry Hill with her husband.
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Jane Gorman. Hey, Jane, how are you doing?
Jane: I'm doing great. How are you, Matty? Thanks for having me here today.
Matty: It is my pleasure. I'm doing great. So just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Jane Gorman was born in Canada to an English father and a Polish mother. The family moved to the United States only a few years later, where Jane grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. She worked briefly in academics after completing a doctorate in cultural anthropology, then became a diplomat with the US State Department representing US interests at international organizations.
Jane was a Fulbright Fellow at Warsaw university, a Woodrow Wilson Institute Junior Scholar, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Diplomacy Fellow. After settling down with a job in the National Park Service, Jane turned her pen to subjects long near to her heart: murder and mystery.
Her first novel, A Blind Eye, is set in Poland. Later novels in the series send Detective Adam Kaminski to Washington, DC Philadelphia, and Galway, and Jane lives in Cherry Hill with her husband.
Today we're going to be talking about Judging a Book by Its Cover and we're going to be talking about, among other things, the three primary aspects of a cover design: the title, the cover, and the back cover description. I'm super excited to be having this conversation with Jane, who has beautiful covers for her books.
But before we launch into the discussion, Jane, can you just give a little bit of context about your Adam Kaminski series so listeners know where we're coming from in terms of the kind of books we're designing covers for?
Jane: Sure. My books are traditional murder mysteries. They don't involve a lot of gore, but there's definitely murder. There's some darkness, but they're not too dark. They're comfortable, traditional murder mystery, but they each take place in a different location, a different setting.
For me, the covers are so important to let the reader know where they're going when they pick up this book. The first book, as you said, is in Warsaw. I have two books that are set in the United States--in Philadelphia and Washington--and the later books go to Galway. I have a book on a cruise, and then my most recent one is in a village in the South of France.
So it's the context of a murder mystery that travels the world.
Jane: I'm doing great. How are you, Matty? Thanks for having me here today.
Matty: It is my pleasure. I'm doing great. So just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Jane Gorman was born in Canada to an English father and a Polish mother. The family moved to the United States only a few years later, where Jane grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. She worked briefly in academics after completing a doctorate in cultural anthropology, then became a diplomat with the US State Department representing US interests at international organizations.
Jane was a Fulbright Fellow at Warsaw university, a Woodrow Wilson Institute Junior Scholar, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Diplomacy Fellow. After settling down with a job in the National Park Service, Jane turned her pen to subjects long near to her heart: murder and mystery.
Her first novel, A Blind Eye, is set in Poland. Later novels in the series send Detective Adam Kaminski to Washington, DC Philadelphia, and Galway, and Jane lives in Cherry Hill with her husband.
Today we're going to be talking about Judging a Book by Its Cover and we're going to be talking about, among other things, the three primary aspects of a cover design: the title, the cover, and the back cover description. I'm super excited to be having this conversation with Jane, who has beautiful covers for her books.
But before we launch into the discussion, Jane, can you just give a little bit of context about your Adam Kaminski series so listeners know where we're coming from in terms of the kind of books we're designing covers for?
Jane: Sure. My books are traditional murder mysteries. They don't involve a lot of gore, but there's definitely murder. There's some darkness, but they're not too dark. They're comfortable, traditional murder mystery, but they each take place in a different location, a different setting.
For me, the covers are so important to let the reader know where they're going when they pick up this book. The first book, as you said, is in Warsaw. I have two books that are set in the United States--in Philadelphia and Washington--and the later books go to Galway. I have a book on a cruise, and then my most recent one is in a village in the South of France.
So it's the context of a murder mystery that travels the world.
read more ...
Matty: Excellent. I do not have your books themselves here, but I do have a postcard I got an author event of Jane's lovely covers. And describe a little bit how have you reflected what you just described about the Adam Kaminski mysteries into the book cover design.
Jane: Sure. The way I work with my book cover designer is I will send him photographs of the places that I'm writing about, because they're all places that I've visited repeatedly or frequently, and that will give him a sense of the location, a sense of a place. He then in his great genius, and this is not my genius, he turns that image into a cover that really depicts the feel of the book. What he'll do is he'll incorporate an element of the murder. I can hold this one up because this is my favorite: What She Fears, this is the one set in Galway. and what he did was he took the image of The Long Walk in Galway, and I'd send him my photograph of that--he didn't use my photograph, I guess my photograph wasn't good enough--but he found one that he had the rights to. And then he incorporated this pink scarf, which is the murder weapon in the book. So each book includes an image of the place. Here's another one. This one is in Washington DC, and there's a bullet hole because this book involves death by gunshot, by bullet. So again, an image of the location and then an element of the murder and how it happened.
Matty: Is that a spoiler at all? If someone examined the cover very carefully and saw the scarf, would that be a spoiler at all?
Jane: No. Each of my books, the murder happens either before the first page or within the first couple of chapters. There's never any question who's dead and how they died. The real question is who killed them.
Matty: That's a great benefit of being an indy author, you also independently publish your books, because I have heard horror stories of traditionally published authors whose cover designer has put something in the cover that, if a reader really examined it closely, would give away the punchline, which could be an Easter egg, depending on how subtly they've done it.
Jane: That's true. And you know, it's funny, I know we're going to talk about titles soon, but titles can be too, because it's so tricky to come up with a title that gives a feel for your book, and you kind of want to give something away, but I want that title to be a mystery as well, until about halfway, three-quarters, maybe even towards the end of the book where the reader says, "Oh, that's what that title is."
Matty: Do any of your titles come from epigraphs that you include in the beginning of your book?
Jane: No, and I thought about doing that, but most of my titles come from poems that I don't have the rights to publish.
Matty: But you are able to use the quote for it from your title.
Jane: Yeah, because either slightly modified or it's just three words.
Matty: Describe a little bit how you found your cover designer and how you work with that person.
Jane: I spent a lot of time looking for just the right cover designer because we're talking about the cover--it's so important, people really do judge a book by the cover, I can't emphasize that enough for any indy author.
I started first by looking at other books that I liked. Obviously if you find a cover that you like, find out who designed that cover. I also went to contests. There are a lot of contests out there for cover designers, so go and see who's winning these contests.
And sometimes it might not be the person who won. You might see someone else submitted for that contest, but you just love their style. You love their look, and that could work for you. So that's what I started doing. I started for maybe six months, just tracking what covers that I liked --contests of cover artists and cover art-- and that's how I found my cover artist. I realized after a few months, whenever I found a cover that I liked, it was him. It was the same guy.
Matty: No kidding. That's a nice recommendation.
Jane: Yeah. And it was the perfect fit for me. Now I know he does so many different kinds of covers, so there may be someone out there writing a cozy mystery, something completely different, and they love his work as well. But I know I love his work: Bookfly Design.
Matty: I think that the question about judging a book by its cover, it's easy for an author to poopoo that notion, but think about what one does as a reader, that there's no way if you're scanning for books in a bookstore or on a retail site, that you open every one up and read the blurb and then read the first few pages. No, your first cut it always glancing at the cover.
I had Lisa Reagan on the podcast a couple of episodes ago and we were talking about how book covers often telegraph something very important to a reader. We were making jokes about the creepy house in the woods cover type, or the woman running away with the red jacket type, and an author who's going to a traditional publisher, or even one who's trying to pick their own cover, may shy away from doing a cover that is similar to one that's out there.
But I think it's sending a really important message to the readers saying, "Oh, if you liked this book that had the creepy house in the woods, you're very likely to like this book that has the creepy house in the woods."
Jane: That is a great point. That is really good point. Now, I don't know if my cover designer was influenced by other books, to be honest.
I mean, I know that I liked the books that he did that I chose. That's why I chose him, but the covers are different from the ones that he had done previously, but that's such a good point. It conveys a style. A tone. Like you said, if you like this author, then you're going to like this.
Matty: And especially when the place, the setting is so important in your books and the covers also give a sense of that without hitting the browser over the head with it, that the location is incorporated in a very nice subtle way in them.
And I do also like the touches, like the scarf wending through the letters in What She Fears. For Snakes and Ladders, my cover designer, who was Juan Padron, had done this effect of laddering the letters in Ladders. They're sort of offset a little bit. That's good-- except I did have the cover rejected once by one of the publishing platforms because they said there was something odd going on with the title. I said, no, that's intentional. So you have to face those kinds of things. But similarly, the O in Iron is an iron ring.
I had gotten my cover designer for the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers through 99 designs. And unlike the Ann Kinnear novels, where I had a really clear idea of what I wanted the cover to look like, I had no idea. So I ran this contest on 99 designs, and it was a blind contest, which means that the designers who were submitting designs didn't see each other's work. In an open contest, which I did, for example, for The Indy Author logo, everyone's seeing everybody else's designs. And so if you have a pretty good idea of what you want, you can start liking the things that are closest to what you like. And then everybody goes to that because they know you like it.
But with this, I had no idea. So it was a blind contest and I put up the title and a description and so on. You can imagine if it was called Rock Paper Scissors, I got a lot of really overt rock, paper, scissors submissions.
But I really liked the cover design Juan did for Rock Paper Scissors because it incorporates the rock-- the rock actually is the background of the cover-- and then on the back there's this little slip of paper for the paper. And then similarly, the letters in Scissors are cut to reflect the scissors.
One thing I really appreciated was that it was subtle, and again, it's kind of like an Easter egg. This is a good Easter egg for a reader that if they're looking carefully at the cover, they can say, "Oh, I see what they're doing there," which is kind of fun. I like doing that with other people's covers.
Jane: Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny. My first cover is similar, I think. When I hired him, I told him that I wanted to highlight the place. For me, the sense of place was important. I gave him a sense of color. I have this vision, whenever I write, each of my books has a color of my mind.
I gave him a sense of the color and the title. I told him the storyline, obviously. And he came up with this concept. This is the first one, and in this book, the victim dies by drowning, so there's a hand floating in water and her hair is fanning out. It was his idea to incorporate this method of death into the place, which obviously I loved. So that worked out well.
Matty: The other thing I like very much about your covers, which I think is a best practice, and I'm going to hold this up again so people can see at least the first four, they're now six, but those are the first four and what that's showing is that idea of the color. I have seen people who do series and they're all the same color. And I just picture someone going into a bookstore and saying, "I want that Joe Schmo book, you know, the one that's black and white." And having the person say, "Well, they're all black and white. Which one do you mean?"
Jane: I mean, I see the benefit too, you and I think I've talked about this before, that there is value in consistency in the colors across the series so everyone knows it's the same series. I do understand why some people might want the same color, but then you have to find another way to differentiate it. It's not the color. It's got to be something that this book stands out from that book. Definitely.
Matty: Yes. I think that the best practices in terms of series cover design are an identifiable look, which you obviously have because you have the consistent palette, even though the colors are different, they're all sort of subtle—kind of earth tones, I guess—but the font of the title is always consistent and the presentation of the author name is always consistent. And I think those are really important. Even if you're writing across different series, I think that having the author name have an identifiable font is part of a branding effort.
Jane: That's a great observation. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Jane Gorman is my brand, so that my readers, whichever series they want to read, they know that it's me throughout. Yeah. I like that.
Matty: And I also really liked the idea of you going out to see who's winning the contests. That's a great tip. Do you recall any of the particular sites you went to to investigate that?
Jane: I do. Joel Friedlander. That's where I ultimately found my cover artist because he has a few contests and that's where I went.
Matty: Great. I'll include a link to his site in the show notes for this episode so people can easily find that.
The other thing I think is so important is making sure that your cover is right for your genre. And so I have just had this very interesting experience of going to get my first nonfiction cover.
I'll just hold up another example of my suspense thriller book, The Iron Ring, a very dark, moody, sort of a dark purple-ish red color.
And then I went to another cover designer named Lance Buckley to get my cover for Taking the Short Tack. Totally different, you know, very bright, cheery, can-do kind of colors, so that was interesting to see how much can be telegraphed. The font is very straightforward, no nonsense. It was interesting to see how much can be telegraphed just by the choices you make there.
Jane: It's so true. I am not an artist, except by words maybe, but I'm not an artist, but an artist really can convey so much through even just the type of font. But she was, like you said, can convey the theme, the tone, the feel of the book, mystery, nonfiction, whatever it is. Absolutely.
Matty: And I'll just reiterate again, as I often do, that book cover design is not one of those things that the indy author wants to do themselves.
Do not pull up PowerPoint. Do not even pull up BookBrush or Canva or something like that, because people who have an eye for these cover design issues, it's as if they were going to write a novel and they just decided, "Oh, well, you know, I can make a nice cover and I'll just slap together a novel."
It's our job as the author to "slap together the novel" and it's their job as the cover designer to put a nice package on it. Very different.
The one caveat I have to admit to that is that when I was doing the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, I couldn't afford to invest the same amount of money that I would invest in a professional cover design to the scale that I would for a novel-length book that is also going to be a print book, because not only does the person who's designing the print cover have to come up with the lovely and genre-appropriate cover, but they also have to design a whole back.
That is a skill unto itself. Now with a short story that's for now only going to come out in ebook, all I needed was the front cover, and so what I did in order to control the costs for that was that I worked with a professional designer to come up with a template that had my name in it in the same font that the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels did, so it was clearly branded for me. The fonts of the title were very similar to the fonts of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, and then I would find a photo on a platform like unsplash and I would send it to him and he could very quickly create a cover that incorporated that photo.
And in many cases, I was even specifying what part of the photo I wanted to include in the cover. And then, he would just put the Ann Kinnear Suspense Short on it and my name. But even the way he put the title on, he always adjusted it a little bit. It wasn't just straight text, it was always offset a little bit. So even in that really, really simple, seemingly simple idea of putting a title on a cover that's sort of a template, there's still a skill to it, but it was much, much less expensive than it would have been if I had gone the full-blown route.
Jane: A lot of designers, mine included, offer ebook cover only. My books are available in print as well, but a lot of designers probably do offer ebook only, which will be less expensive than the paper because as you say it's just the front cover and not the back and the spine,
Matty: That's a great point. We could probably do an entire episode just on cover design, but I did want to cover one other topic, and that is the title because I love your titles as much as I love your cover design. Talk a little bit about where the titles for your books came from, maybe just run through first what all the titles of the Adam Kaminski books are.
Jane: Okay. A Blind Eye is the first book, and that is truly just the saying that we've all heard, that you turn a blind eye to something and it's an expression that's used later in the book.
And I just wanted to convey that we all see things that we try to pretend not to see. But they're there. And then the next book, A Thin Veil, I might go out of order here actually, because they're connected. A Thin Veil and What She Fears are pulled from the same poem, which is an E. A. Robinson poem that I love about a marriage where the woman is being abused and everyone in town knows it. They can see it, but they pull a thin veil between what they can see and what they pretend is happening and what she fears. In fact, those are both lines from the poem. So very similar to A Blind Eye, this idea that you kind of see what's going on, but it's there. It's in our community. People are killing each other, but we pretend not to see it.
All That Glitters is one of my titles, and that also came from a poem: Richard Cory. "Whenever we went downtown," and he's rich and thin and famous and everyone loves him, and then it turns out that all that glitters is not in fact gold. So All That Glitters again, this idea of deception, this idea of things aren't always as they appear.
A Pale Reflection. And I would love to talk about this title. This is my fifth book--A Pale Reflection, this is the cruise-- because I struggled with that title. I had another title that I wanted but I ended up with A Pale Reflection. And then my final one, this is my current book out now, The Bitter Truth. And again, I had two titles for that that I was bouncing back and forth, but I ended up with The Bitter Truth.
Matty: Can you talk a little bit about what your other title was that you were considering and why you chose the ones you chose?
Jane: Yes. For The Bitter Truth, I wanted to call it Truth Will Out, which is from Shakespeare, that in the end the truth will come out. But the line in the Shakespeare line is "truth will out," which works for me because all my titles are three words and it's got that punchiness to it, but on its own, people didn't really get it. I ran it by a few potential free readers and friends and fellow writers, and on its own without the context of the whole Shakespeare play it didn't really convey this idea that the truth will eventually come out one way or another. Now, that truth, of course, is the bitter truth. I thought, well, I better go with The Bitter Truth. The book is also about wine making because it does take place in the South of France, and wine can turn bitter when left out and not cared for.
I've got that correlation of the truth coming out, and it not being as sweet as perhaps it should have been.
Matty: Nice.
Jane: And then for A Pale Reflection, I wanted to call it Through a Glass Darkly, which is actually, I believe, a quote from the Bible, although I tend to think of Alice in Wonderland when I say it as well, but is the word from the Bible, and early on in A Pale Reflection, I have Adam Kaminski talking to his sister and the whole idea here is this is a book really, about Adam's own self exploration. He sees himself through a glass darkly. He doesn't really see himself who he really is. But in the end, I thought, okay, A Pale Reflection gives the same kind of idea that he's looking in a mirror and he's not seeing clearly, and he needs to see clearly in order to figure out what's really going on. We begin with a pale reflection, and then we end with something different.
Matty: That's very cool. I love hearing stories about how people come up with titles. I've had books that I knew right away what I wanted to call them and ones that I didn't. And you've helped me struggle through at least one of those.
But when I started the Ann Kinnear suspense novels, I thought, she's a spirit senser, so I thought The Sense of Death without even looking it up. I liked the title The Sense of Death, and I thought there must be other books out there with that title, which much to my surprise doesn't actually knock a title completely out of the park because titles are not copyrighted, if I understand correctly.
But of course you can get into other kinds of trouble if you just pick a title that's already out there. I watched a movie called Girl on the Train for a long time before I realized that was not the novel that I thought it was, but I thought, well, certainly people have used The Sense of Death and nobody had.
If I went on a search for Amazon, there weren't any other books out there called The Sense of Death. And then when I did the second one, I thought, "Oh, I wonder if there are any more 'sense ' quotes," and I found The Sense of Reckoning. The Sense of Death was coincidentally appropriate for the first book.
And they're all Shakespeare quotes, all my Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts and Suspense Novels are Shakespeare quotes, except for one that's John Milton, but it was so good I couldn't pass it up.
The Sense of Death quote is:
"The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a giant dies."
That's from Measure for Measure. And that was perfect for the story.
The Sense of Reckoning is that famous. speech from Henry the Fifth that goes:
"O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts.
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them."
So, those worked great. And now I'm set for life because I can use Shakespeare quotes for those. There are a lot of those as you can find those for any purpose.
But when I was working on the Lizzy Ballard books, it was really late in the game that actually my husband came up with Rock Paper Scissors because the theme of that is, what power bests what power. And that was great because I love series that have a theme to the titles. I thought this is great, I'll just do traditional game kind of titles.
And Snakes and Ladders was obvious. If anyone reads a story, you'll see why snakes and Ladders was an easy one. And snakes and ladders is the historic background for the kids' game, Chutes and Ladders, and it's all about being rewarded for your virtues and being punished for your vices.
And then, as you know, I struggled with The Iron Ring for a long time. At one point it was going to be called Cat's Cradle, and I actually even had the cover designed with Cat's Cradle on it, and of course Juan incorporated the string game cat's cradle into the cover, and then probably through a conversation that I had with you and your lovely husband at a winery, this idea of the iron ring or the brass ring came up.
And I love that because The Sword in the Stone is one of my favorite all time books. And there's a section in there about when the young Wart and Kay are learning to joust and they joist at a quintain, it's a wooden figure painted to look like a Saracen and then if they don't hit it in the center, it spins around and whacks them in the back. But another part of that was about how they would try to spear the iron ring off a thread with their jousting lance. And the more I thought about that, the more I liked that because the theme of that book is each person has their iron ring. What is their goal? Is it power? Is it community? Is it something else? Is it selfish or is it unselfish? And I liked that so much that I wanted to include the quote from The Sword in the Stone as an epigraph. And I got in touch with the publisher and I asked what it would cost for me to have the rights to publish that? And I heard back and it was, thousands of dollars for a limited time for US only. <Post episode note: I looked this up after the recording; the quoted price was actually only £150, but for only five years NOT including US and Philippines (I would have had to negotiate those separately); when I declined, they came down to £80.>
I wrote back and I said, “Thank you. I can't afford that.” And so pretty soon I got another email back with a vastly reduced price. It was still more than I wanted to pay. But that was my tip that if you're asking a major publisher for rights, don't take their first offer because they might come down.
Jane: Right. Cause I love that idea. Like when your title is pulled from something else, it's so nice to include that quote.
Matty: That's the benefit of Shakespeare that nobody's going to come after me for using a Shakespeare quote, so I can include all the epigraphs in the front of the books.
You are now thinking of moving into a different genre.
Jane: It's still a bit down the road because I'm still working on the first book and we'll see how long that takes to come out and publish.
But yeah, I'm starting a cozy mystery series set in Cape May, New Jersey. It's very different from my Adam Kaminski book because it's always in one place, same characters. I do not yet have a cover idea in mind. And I don't think I will until I finish the book. Maybe even finish the second book and really have a sense of where the series is going.
What kind of image? Cozy mysteries have such a different feel. You know, you look for something pink. These are going to be cozy mysteries with a twist as well. I'm picturing Cape May Cozies with a little lemon twist at the end, perhaps in the title, because it's that kind of twist.
Matty: Now would you go back to the cover designer who did the Adam Kaminski books for this one?
Jane: I might, but I would have to see what he could come up with. Cause even my first book when a cover designer produces an option, you get to look at it and say, well, yes or no. So I might ask him to produce something, but I think I'll also go back and go through the same process I went through before and see who else is doing cozy mystery covers that I like.
And also it helps to look at those other covers too, to figure out what I want for my books. Like what speaks to me, what works, and it'll probably be pink.
Matty: Will you have pink be the theme color, are you thinking each one might be a little bit different?
Jane: That's a great question. Each book is going to have a different cocktail recipe in it.
Matty: I love that.
Jane: In the first book, the cocktail is a pink cocktail, so we'll see. Maybe the cover of the color will match the cocktail. I don't know.
Matty: I do think that it's beneficial to just go to the genre page on your favorite online retailer or go to that shelf in your favorite in person bookstore, and just step back and scan and see what colors are popping out.
Because I always think of pink and green and blue if I think of cozy mysteries, they're usually much, obviously brighter.
Jane: Brighter, pastel, cheerful. Yeah. And I've loved writing the cozy series too, because you do have this different tone. And you want to cover that will convey that tone. Absolutely.
Matty: And I love the title options that are enabled by having the cocktail theme. I think you could have a lot of fun with that.
Jane: I think so. I think so. I'll be working on that over the next few months.
Matty: Well, that was great, Jane. I think that we've uncovered lots of best practices for people who are at that point where they're looking for book cover designer or they're thinking about what to name their book.
If people want to find out more about you and your books, where can they go to find that.
Jane: Go to my website, janegorman.com. I am also on Facebook at JaneGormanAuthor. I am on Twitter at TheJaneGorman. I'm on Instagram at JaneGorman1776. But you can get all of those from my website as well, janegorman.com
Matty: And lots of great travel photos, I believe on Instagram specifically if people are interested in that.
Jane: It's mostly on Instagram, but I also put some up on Facebook as well.
Matty: Okay. Great. Well, thank you so much, Jane. This has been so much fun.
Jane: Thank you, Matty. It really has been fun.
Jane: Sure. The way I work with my book cover designer is I will send him photographs of the places that I'm writing about, because they're all places that I've visited repeatedly or frequently, and that will give him a sense of the location, a sense of a place. He then in his great genius, and this is not my genius, he turns that image into a cover that really depicts the feel of the book. What he'll do is he'll incorporate an element of the murder. I can hold this one up because this is my favorite: What She Fears, this is the one set in Galway. and what he did was he took the image of The Long Walk in Galway, and I'd send him my photograph of that--he didn't use my photograph, I guess my photograph wasn't good enough--but he found one that he had the rights to. And then he incorporated this pink scarf, which is the murder weapon in the book. So each book includes an image of the place. Here's another one. This one is in Washington DC, and there's a bullet hole because this book involves death by gunshot, by bullet. So again, an image of the location and then an element of the murder and how it happened.
Matty: Is that a spoiler at all? If someone examined the cover very carefully and saw the scarf, would that be a spoiler at all?
Jane: No. Each of my books, the murder happens either before the first page or within the first couple of chapters. There's never any question who's dead and how they died. The real question is who killed them.
Matty: That's a great benefit of being an indy author, you also independently publish your books, because I have heard horror stories of traditionally published authors whose cover designer has put something in the cover that, if a reader really examined it closely, would give away the punchline, which could be an Easter egg, depending on how subtly they've done it.
Jane: That's true. And you know, it's funny, I know we're going to talk about titles soon, but titles can be too, because it's so tricky to come up with a title that gives a feel for your book, and you kind of want to give something away, but I want that title to be a mystery as well, until about halfway, three-quarters, maybe even towards the end of the book where the reader says, "Oh, that's what that title is."
Matty: Do any of your titles come from epigraphs that you include in the beginning of your book?
Jane: No, and I thought about doing that, but most of my titles come from poems that I don't have the rights to publish.
Matty: But you are able to use the quote for it from your title.
Jane: Yeah, because either slightly modified or it's just three words.
Matty: Describe a little bit how you found your cover designer and how you work with that person.
Jane: I spent a lot of time looking for just the right cover designer because we're talking about the cover--it's so important, people really do judge a book by the cover, I can't emphasize that enough for any indy author.
I started first by looking at other books that I liked. Obviously if you find a cover that you like, find out who designed that cover. I also went to contests. There are a lot of contests out there for cover designers, so go and see who's winning these contests.
And sometimes it might not be the person who won. You might see someone else submitted for that contest, but you just love their style. You love their look, and that could work for you. So that's what I started doing. I started for maybe six months, just tracking what covers that I liked --contests of cover artists and cover art-- and that's how I found my cover artist. I realized after a few months, whenever I found a cover that I liked, it was him. It was the same guy.
Matty: No kidding. That's a nice recommendation.
Jane: Yeah. And it was the perfect fit for me. Now I know he does so many different kinds of covers, so there may be someone out there writing a cozy mystery, something completely different, and they love his work as well. But I know I love his work: Bookfly Design.
Matty: I think that the question about judging a book by its cover, it's easy for an author to poopoo that notion, but think about what one does as a reader, that there's no way if you're scanning for books in a bookstore or on a retail site, that you open every one up and read the blurb and then read the first few pages. No, your first cut it always glancing at the cover.
I had Lisa Reagan on the podcast a couple of episodes ago and we were talking about how book covers often telegraph something very important to a reader. We were making jokes about the creepy house in the woods cover type, or the woman running away with the red jacket type, and an author who's going to a traditional publisher, or even one who's trying to pick their own cover, may shy away from doing a cover that is similar to one that's out there.
But I think it's sending a really important message to the readers saying, "Oh, if you liked this book that had the creepy house in the woods, you're very likely to like this book that has the creepy house in the woods."
Jane: That is a great point. That is really good point. Now, I don't know if my cover designer was influenced by other books, to be honest.
I mean, I know that I liked the books that he did that I chose. That's why I chose him, but the covers are different from the ones that he had done previously, but that's such a good point. It conveys a style. A tone. Like you said, if you like this author, then you're going to like this.
Matty: And especially when the place, the setting is so important in your books and the covers also give a sense of that without hitting the browser over the head with it, that the location is incorporated in a very nice subtle way in them.
And I do also like the touches, like the scarf wending through the letters in What She Fears. For Snakes and Ladders, my cover designer, who was Juan Padron, had done this effect of laddering the letters in Ladders. They're sort of offset a little bit. That's good-- except I did have the cover rejected once by one of the publishing platforms because they said there was something odd going on with the title. I said, no, that's intentional. So you have to face those kinds of things. But similarly, the O in Iron is an iron ring.
I had gotten my cover designer for the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers through 99 designs. And unlike the Ann Kinnear novels, where I had a really clear idea of what I wanted the cover to look like, I had no idea. So I ran this contest on 99 designs, and it was a blind contest, which means that the designers who were submitting designs didn't see each other's work. In an open contest, which I did, for example, for The Indy Author logo, everyone's seeing everybody else's designs. And so if you have a pretty good idea of what you want, you can start liking the things that are closest to what you like. And then everybody goes to that because they know you like it.
But with this, I had no idea. So it was a blind contest and I put up the title and a description and so on. You can imagine if it was called Rock Paper Scissors, I got a lot of really overt rock, paper, scissors submissions.
But I really liked the cover design Juan did for Rock Paper Scissors because it incorporates the rock-- the rock actually is the background of the cover-- and then on the back there's this little slip of paper for the paper. And then similarly, the letters in Scissors are cut to reflect the scissors.
One thing I really appreciated was that it was subtle, and again, it's kind of like an Easter egg. This is a good Easter egg for a reader that if they're looking carefully at the cover, they can say, "Oh, I see what they're doing there," which is kind of fun. I like doing that with other people's covers.
Jane: Absolutely. Yeah. It's funny. My first cover is similar, I think. When I hired him, I told him that I wanted to highlight the place. For me, the sense of place was important. I gave him a sense of color. I have this vision, whenever I write, each of my books has a color of my mind.
I gave him a sense of the color and the title. I told him the storyline, obviously. And he came up with this concept. This is the first one, and in this book, the victim dies by drowning, so there's a hand floating in water and her hair is fanning out. It was his idea to incorporate this method of death into the place, which obviously I loved. So that worked out well.
Matty: The other thing I like very much about your covers, which I think is a best practice, and I'm going to hold this up again so people can see at least the first four, they're now six, but those are the first four and what that's showing is that idea of the color. I have seen people who do series and they're all the same color. And I just picture someone going into a bookstore and saying, "I want that Joe Schmo book, you know, the one that's black and white." And having the person say, "Well, they're all black and white. Which one do you mean?"
Jane: I mean, I see the benefit too, you and I think I've talked about this before, that there is value in consistency in the colors across the series so everyone knows it's the same series. I do understand why some people might want the same color, but then you have to find another way to differentiate it. It's not the color. It's got to be something that this book stands out from that book. Definitely.
Matty: Yes. I think that the best practices in terms of series cover design are an identifiable look, which you obviously have because you have the consistent palette, even though the colors are different, they're all sort of subtle—kind of earth tones, I guess—but the font of the title is always consistent and the presentation of the author name is always consistent. And I think those are really important. Even if you're writing across different series, I think that having the author name have an identifiable font is part of a branding effort.
Jane: That's a great observation. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Jane Gorman is my brand, so that my readers, whichever series they want to read, they know that it's me throughout. Yeah. I like that.
Matty: And I also really liked the idea of you going out to see who's winning the contests. That's a great tip. Do you recall any of the particular sites you went to to investigate that?
Jane: I do. Joel Friedlander. That's where I ultimately found my cover artist because he has a few contests and that's where I went.
Matty: Great. I'll include a link to his site in the show notes for this episode so people can easily find that.
The other thing I think is so important is making sure that your cover is right for your genre. And so I have just had this very interesting experience of going to get my first nonfiction cover.
I'll just hold up another example of my suspense thriller book, The Iron Ring, a very dark, moody, sort of a dark purple-ish red color.
And then I went to another cover designer named Lance Buckley to get my cover for Taking the Short Tack. Totally different, you know, very bright, cheery, can-do kind of colors, so that was interesting to see how much can be telegraphed. The font is very straightforward, no nonsense. It was interesting to see how much can be telegraphed just by the choices you make there.
Jane: It's so true. I am not an artist, except by words maybe, but I'm not an artist, but an artist really can convey so much through even just the type of font. But she was, like you said, can convey the theme, the tone, the feel of the book, mystery, nonfiction, whatever it is. Absolutely.
Matty: And I'll just reiterate again, as I often do, that book cover design is not one of those things that the indy author wants to do themselves.
Do not pull up PowerPoint. Do not even pull up BookBrush or Canva or something like that, because people who have an eye for these cover design issues, it's as if they were going to write a novel and they just decided, "Oh, well, you know, I can make a nice cover and I'll just slap together a novel."
It's our job as the author to "slap together the novel" and it's their job as the cover designer to put a nice package on it. Very different.
The one caveat I have to admit to that is that when I was doing the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, I couldn't afford to invest the same amount of money that I would invest in a professional cover design to the scale that I would for a novel-length book that is also going to be a print book, because not only does the person who's designing the print cover have to come up with the lovely and genre-appropriate cover, but they also have to design a whole back.
That is a skill unto itself. Now with a short story that's for now only going to come out in ebook, all I needed was the front cover, and so what I did in order to control the costs for that was that I worked with a professional designer to come up with a template that had my name in it in the same font that the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels did, so it was clearly branded for me. The fonts of the title were very similar to the fonts of the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, and then I would find a photo on a platform like unsplash and I would send it to him and he could very quickly create a cover that incorporated that photo.
And in many cases, I was even specifying what part of the photo I wanted to include in the cover. And then, he would just put the Ann Kinnear Suspense Short on it and my name. But even the way he put the title on, he always adjusted it a little bit. It wasn't just straight text, it was always offset a little bit. So even in that really, really simple, seemingly simple idea of putting a title on a cover that's sort of a template, there's still a skill to it, but it was much, much less expensive than it would have been if I had gone the full-blown route.
Jane: A lot of designers, mine included, offer ebook cover only. My books are available in print as well, but a lot of designers probably do offer ebook only, which will be less expensive than the paper because as you say it's just the front cover and not the back and the spine,
Matty: That's a great point. We could probably do an entire episode just on cover design, but I did want to cover one other topic, and that is the title because I love your titles as much as I love your cover design. Talk a little bit about where the titles for your books came from, maybe just run through first what all the titles of the Adam Kaminski books are.
Jane: Okay. A Blind Eye is the first book, and that is truly just the saying that we've all heard, that you turn a blind eye to something and it's an expression that's used later in the book.
And I just wanted to convey that we all see things that we try to pretend not to see. But they're there. And then the next book, A Thin Veil, I might go out of order here actually, because they're connected. A Thin Veil and What She Fears are pulled from the same poem, which is an E. A. Robinson poem that I love about a marriage where the woman is being abused and everyone in town knows it. They can see it, but they pull a thin veil between what they can see and what they pretend is happening and what she fears. In fact, those are both lines from the poem. So very similar to A Blind Eye, this idea that you kind of see what's going on, but it's there. It's in our community. People are killing each other, but we pretend not to see it.
All That Glitters is one of my titles, and that also came from a poem: Richard Cory. "Whenever we went downtown," and he's rich and thin and famous and everyone loves him, and then it turns out that all that glitters is not in fact gold. So All That Glitters again, this idea of deception, this idea of things aren't always as they appear.
A Pale Reflection. And I would love to talk about this title. This is my fifth book--A Pale Reflection, this is the cruise-- because I struggled with that title. I had another title that I wanted but I ended up with A Pale Reflection. And then my final one, this is my current book out now, The Bitter Truth. And again, I had two titles for that that I was bouncing back and forth, but I ended up with The Bitter Truth.
Matty: Can you talk a little bit about what your other title was that you were considering and why you chose the ones you chose?
Jane: Yes. For The Bitter Truth, I wanted to call it Truth Will Out, which is from Shakespeare, that in the end the truth will come out. But the line in the Shakespeare line is "truth will out," which works for me because all my titles are three words and it's got that punchiness to it, but on its own, people didn't really get it. I ran it by a few potential free readers and friends and fellow writers, and on its own without the context of the whole Shakespeare play it didn't really convey this idea that the truth will eventually come out one way or another. Now, that truth, of course, is the bitter truth. I thought, well, I better go with The Bitter Truth. The book is also about wine making because it does take place in the South of France, and wine can turn bitter when left out and not cared for.
I've got that correlation of the truth coming out, and it not being as sweet as perhaps it should have been.
Matty: Nice.
Jane: And then for A Pale Reflection, I wanted to call it Through a Glass Darkly, which is actually, I believe, a quote from the Bible, although I tend to think of Alice in Wonderland when I say it as well, but is the word from the Bible, and early on in A Pale Reflection, I have Adam Kaminski talking to his sister and the whole idea here is this is a book really, about Adam's own self exploration. He sees himself through a glass darkly. He doesn't really see himself who he really is. But in the end, I thought, okay, A Pale Reflection gives the same kind of idea that he's looking in a mirror and he's not seeing clearly, and he needs to see clearly in order to figure out what's really going on. We begin with a pale reflection, and then we end with something different.
Matty: That's very cool. I love hearing stories about how people come up with titles. I've had books that I knew right away what I wanted to call them and ones that I didn't. And you've helped me struggle through at least one of those.
But when I started the Ann Kinnear suspense novels, I thought, she's a spirit senser, so I thought The Sense of Death without even looking it up. I liked the title The Sense of Death, and I thought there must be other books out there with that title, which much to my surprise doesn't actually knock a title completely out of the park because titles are not copyrighted, if I understand correctly.
But of course you can get into other kinds of trouble if you just pick a title that's already out there. I watched a movie called Girl on the Train for a long time before I realized that was not the novel that I thought it was, but I thought, well, certainly people have used The Sense of Death and nobody had.
If I went on a search for Amazon, there weren't any other books out there called The Sense of Death. And then when I did the second one, I thought, "Oh, I wonder if there are any more 'sense ' quotes," and I found The Sense of Reckoning. The Sense of Death was coincidentally appropriate for the first book.
And they're all Shakespeare quotes, all my Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts and Suspense Novels are Shakespeare quotes, except for one that's John Milton, but it was so good I couldn't pass it up.
The Sense of Death quote is:
"The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a giant dies."
That's from Measure for Measure. And that was perfect for the story.
The Sense of Reckoning is that famous. speech from Henry the Fifth that goes:
"O God of battles! steel my soldiers' hearts.
Possess them not with fear. Take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them."
So, those worked great. And now I'm set for life because I can use Shakespeare quotes for those. There are a lot of those as you can find those for any purpose.
But when I was working on the Lizzy Ballard books, it was really late in the game that actually my husband came up with Rock Paper Scissors because the theme of that is, what power bests what power. And that was great because I love series that have a theme to the titles. I thought this is great, I'll just do traditional game kind of titles.
And Snakes and Ladders was obvious. If anyone reads a story, you'll see why snakes and Ladders was an easy one. And snakes and ladders is the historic background for the kids' game, Chutes and Ladders, and it's all about being rewarded for your virtues and being punished for your vices.
And then, as you know, I struggled with The Iron Ring for a long time. At one point it was going to be called Cat's Cradle, and I actually even had the cover designed with Cat's Cradle on it, and of course Juan incorporated the string game cat's cradle into the cover, and then probably through a conversation that I had with you and your lovely husband at a winery, this idea of the iron ring or the brass ring came up.
And I love that because The Sword in the Stone is one of my favorite all time books. And there's a section in there about when the young Wart and Kay are learning to joust and they joist at a quintain, it's a wooden figure painted to look like a Saracen and then if they don't hit it in the center, it spins around and whacks them in the back. But another part of that was about how they would try to spear the iron ring off a thread with their jousting lance. And the more I thought about that, the more I liked that because the theme of that book is each person has their iron ring. What is their goal? Is it power? Is it community? Is it something else? Is it selfish or is it unselfish? And I liked that so much that I wanted to include the quote from The Sword in the Stone as an epigraph. And I got in touch with the publisher and I asked what it would cost for me to have the rights to publish that? And I heard back and it was, thousands of dollars for a limited time for US only. <Post episode note: I looked this up after the recording; the quoted price was actually only £150, but for only five years NOT including US and Philippines (I would have had to negotiate those separately); when I declined, they came down to £80.>
I wrote back and I said, “Thank you. I can't afford that.” And so pretty soon I got another email back with a vastly reduced price. It was still more than I wanted to pay. But that was my tip that if you're asking a major publisher for rights, don't take their first offer because they might come down.
Jane: Right. Cause I love that idea. Like when your title is pulled from something else, it's so nice to include that quote.
Matty: That's the benefit of Shakespeare that nobody's going to come after me for using a Shakespeare quote, so I can include all the epigraphs in the front of the books.
You are now thinking of moving into a different genre.
Jane: It's still a bit down the road because I'm still working on the first book and we'll see how long that takes to come out and publish.
But yeah, I'm starting a cozy mystery series set in Cape May, New Jersey. It's very different from my Adam Kaminski book because it's always in one place, same characters. I do not yet have a cover idea in mind. And I don't think I will until I finish the book. Maybe even finish the second book and really have a sense of where the series is going.
What kind of image? Cozy mysteries have such a different feel. You know, you look for something pink. These are going to be cozy mysteries with a twist as well. I'm picturing Cape May Cozies with a little lemon twist at the end, perhaps in the title, because it's that kind of twist.
Matty: Now would you go back to the cover designer who did the Adam Kaminski books for this one?
Jane: I might, but I would have to see what he could come up with. Cause even my first book when a cover designer produces an option, you get to look at it and say, well, yes or no. So I might ask him to produce something, but I think I'll also go back and go through the same process I went through before and see who else is doing cozy mystery covers that I like.
And also it helps to look at those other covers too, to figure out what I want for my books. Like what speaks to me, what works, and it'll probably be pink.
Matty: Will you have pink be the theme color, are you thinking each one might be a little bit different?
Jane: That's a great question. Each book is going to have a different cocktail recipe in it.
Matty: I love that.
Jane: In the first book, the cocktail is a pink cocktail, so we'll see. Maybe the cover of the color will match the cocktail. I don't know.
Matty: I do think that it's beneficial to just go to the genre page on your favorite online retailer or go to that shelf in your favorite in person bookstore, and just step back and scan and see what colors are popping out.
Because I always think of pink and green and blue if I think of cozy mysteries, they're usually much, obviously brighter.
Jane: Brighter, pastel, cheerful. Yeah. And I've loved writing the cozy series too, because you do have this different tone. And you want to cover that will convey that tone. Absolutely.
Matty: And I love the title options that are enabled by having the cocktail theme. I think you could have a lot of fun with that.
Jane: I think so. I think so. I'll be working on that over the next few months.
Matty: Well, that was great, Jane. I think that we've uncovered lots of best practices for people who are at that point where they're looking for book cover designer or they're thinking about what to name their book.
If people want to find out more about you and your books, where can they go to find that.
Jane: Go to my website, janegorman.com. I am also on Facebook at JaneGormanAuthor. I am on Twitter at TheJaneGorman. I'm on Instagram at JaneGorman1776. But you can get all of those from my website as well, janegorman.com
Matty: And lots of great travel photos, I believe on Instagram specifically if people are interested in that.
Jane: It's mostly on Instagram, but I also put some up on Facebook as well.
Matty: Okay. Great. Well, thank you so much, Jane. This has been so much fun.
Jane: Thank you, Matty. It really has been fun.
Links
bookflydesign.com - Jane's book cover designer
thebookdesigner.com - Joel Friedlander's site related to book design; Joel's design contests was one of Jane's sources for researching designers.
juanjpadron.com - Matty's book cover designer for the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers
lancebuckley.com - Matty's book cover designer for Taking the Short Tack
99designs - Source for cover design; Matty likes 99designs so much, she's an affiliate!
unsplash.com - Great source for free images
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