With the new year I feel like I’m making some decent headway editing my third novel for publication. A few more overhauls and maybe a few read-throughs to check the pacing and I’ll send it off to be proofread. In the meantime I’ve also turned my attention towards the cover and what the novel will be called.
Since “River of Hell” is only the working title I needed to come up with something that has a little more punch, and after some thought and discussion with friends I think I’ve finally settled on the title: Catalyst. Not the most original name, but one that I feel has a lot of meaning both in the context of this story and a part of the overall universe the stories have set up. I suppose the full title would be Realm Wraith: Catalyst, which is a little more unique.
Still haven’t quite settled on what to do for a cover, though I have some ideas. Looking back on some of my older covers is rather frustrating, because while they work all right as art pieces, I don’t think they’re quite up to snuff as book covers. They don’t stay very clear at thumbnail size, and they don’t do much to draw the reader in and make them wonder what the book’s about. I suppose the problem is that I’m more of an artist than a designer: I make pretty pictures, but when it comes to arranging pictures and text in a meaningful way to catch a consumer’s eye, I fall short. I’ve given some consideration to redoing the covers of the first two novels entirely, or possibly hiring somebody professional to do a better job. But I’m probably not going to worry about it at the moment. I can at least try to learn from past mistakes while designing a new cover.
In the meantime I’ve been playing around in Photoshop with the idea of advertising, and after looking at templates I ended up making some of my own little design templates for a tablet/kindle object (It’s amazing how easy it is to draw mechanical objects using just shapes and gradients) that I can insert a cover image into. I figure once the final cover for the new novel is finished I’ll slot it into the ad.
I think it came out kinda cool looking.
