My brother-in-law gave me an early present this year–a professionally done cover for one of my books. It’s a great gift, but it introduces a new level of complexity that my simple brain has never dealt with before.
I’m planning on releasing my new book–Drag’n Drop–this month. This is my alternate history urban fantasy book that I actually wrote ten years ago, but never felt like it was ready for primetime. (This is another reason why I’ll never to go mainstream… or sell books, apparently.) The book is done, the formatting is done, but I’m waiting on the cover to be finished.
Thankfully, there is a dragon in the book–he’s one of the main characters. The first obstacle you realize is that… you don’t really have a good idea of what you want on your cover. In self-publishing, I’ve gotten so used to “I’ll just grab an eye-catching picture and throw it on a glitzy-looking cover” that I don’t even have a clue what I wanted on the cover. So I threw out an idea and the artist drew it.
It looked… really good, actually. However, she also did me the honor of actually reading the book, and gave me two more sketches from other scenes in the book that she thought might do better. And she was right! So I went with Option 3, which comes from a big fight scene, and the dragon is coming in and it’s looking cool.
Then we put in the text and… here’s where I have definite opinions. You can tell instantly from a cover whether the author themselves made it or not just based on the font. If it looks I could do it on my software, it’s not that good. However, if you’ve got wordwrap, or unusual fonts, it makes it more glitzy as a professional book and more likely to be bought. The “nothing attracts the crowd like the crowd” theory.
So I never imagined I’d have so many back-and-forths with cover artists, but I guess when you put in more money, you get more problems. Have you had any troubles with covers as a reader? As a writer? Have you had trouble finding these pictures that get thrown onto blogs? Let me know in the comments below!
Albigensia Press 
I had a book of poetry published. I was lucky that the partner of a poet I liked produced a cover that was far better than anything I could imagine. So far that’s the only official book of my own work I’ve had published (I did have a publishing imprint for a little while which published essays, poetry, and plays of others, but it cost me a lot of money in the end).
I’m preparing a short e-book to test the waters of online publishing and luckily I have an artist who is willing to do a cover and also interior artwork as well. Hopefully that will come out early next year.
As for blog posts I do like to include an image with every post I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find something appropriate especially if you already have some sort of idea in your mind of what you want to find. I find lateral thinking helps at times when I’m image searching.
Thank you for sharing! That was really neat to hear another author’s obstacles.