Looking for Artist to Design/Draw Book Cover

[Ryuukokoro]

Good evening Secundi artists!

Thanks for checking into this thread! I am posting this because I know there's a LOT of talented artists here on Secundi, and right now I'm a member of a group that is looking for the services of one.

A small group of local writers in my area has come together with a goal of publishing a series of anthologies of sci fi and fantasy short stories called Scribings. I've joined them in time for publishing vol. 3, which has the theme of 'metamorphosis.' The stories in this volume all deal with themes of change and transformation. Whether it be a stone gargoyle in present-day France who comes to life to protect a church from an old evil, or a gymnast who cheats her way into the Olympics in the future with a program that allows her to see footage from nearby video cameras in her mind.

For volumes 1 and 2 the writers themselves put together the covers for the volumes, but now with volume 3, we're trying to find cover art by a 'real artist.' Rather than, you know, "Here's a cool photo I took, let's put it in Photoshop and add some effects and a title." XD;

Volumes 1 and 2 were mostly only in e-book form. Volume 3 will still be mostly available as an e-book, but we'll be doing a small print run of physical copies as well. The e-book will most likely be priced at $2.99, and the printed copy somewhere around $6-8 each.

Now, on to the subject of payment... first let me say we are all very poor broke writers. ^_^;; Almost all the money made from the sales of the book goes right back into marketing to get the word out that the book exists, and to pay for the physical copies to be printed. We are hoping to find someone who might be interested in donating their talent in exchange for having their art be on the cover of our book, rather than a royalty payment. You would be acknowledged on the copyright page and I'll make sure you get at least one free copy of the physical book.

If this sounds like it might be an interesting project for you, please let me know! I'll be happy to pass along the specs we'd need the art to be (it has to be a very high res image in order to print correctly, for example, and has to be a certain size to fit on front cover and back cover and spine) and to talk more about what we're looking for cover art (basically an image that works with the anthology theme, metamorphosis, and also might work with some of the short stories in the book).

Our group meets every other Tuesday night for now. We're discussing changing it to a weekly meeting, but for now it's bi-weekly. If anyone is interested in making some preliminary sketches of your ideas, I'd be happy to bring them along to the next meeting (April 8 ) and show them to the other writers.

Whew, that was a lot to type. Thanks for reading all the way down to here! ^_^

PS: I am not the 'head of the cover art' department or anything like that, lol, we're all looking for potential cover art on our own and we'll bring it to a vote at a future meeting. So I can't promise anyone that their piece will be used, but I am hoping to find a nice piece for our book.

[Ryuukokoro]

I just had a question from someone about whether it needed to be a drawing, or could it be photo manipulation. Either is fine.

[Ryuukokoro]

In case anyone else is interested, other than the pm's I've gotten, there's still time to let me know! ^_^

I got the cover art specs from the head of the group, so I thought I'd post them here for any artists to look at if you were on the fence thinking about maybe doing something for the cover. Don't worry about the specs too much though, we can always take your art and adjust to fit the specs later.


Cover Art

Ebook cover:

-Needs to be 1,600 x 2,400 pixels
-Must be in JPEG format (the file will end up being anywhere from 250kb to 600kb in size)
    ... but please supply to me as a Photoshop PSD or GIMP XCF file
-Must include the Scribings title, formatted like Vol 1 and Vol 2 (the font used is a free one -- Vera Humana 95 http://www.dafont.com/vera-humana-95.font )

Scribings
Vol 3, 2013

-Also must include the book's title, whatever that is (currently Metamorphosis)
-Must include editor's name, or the Apple bookstore will reject it (edited by Jamie Alan Belanger)
-Must scale down and look good at the following additional resolutions:

Thumb:   150 x 225
Small:   300 x 450
Medium:   600 x 900


Print cover:
In addition to the guidelines above:

-Must be designed full-jacket, with back and spine. Full details at: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/CoverPDF.jsp
-Obviously, we don't know the spine size until we know the page count, so the final PSD file will have to be adjustable to account for this. Make each part of the cover (front, back, and spine) in its own layer. Be sure that spine text doesn't get too close to the edges, as that will be the part that will be resized.
-CreateSpace offers templates (there's a link that page above) based on trim size and page count. The templates have guidelines to let you see how to line up the artwork.
-Trim size is 6" x 9", as that tends to be the most cost effective.
-Basically, you are designing the cover at about 13" x 9.25", 300 dpi. These files are huge. The ones I've created have been between 30 and 50 megs each


Some other notes:

-The back will have our promotional text, the publisher's logo, and some hyperlinks.
-The back must leave room for Amazon to insert the bar code (the template shows where)
-Pay special attention to the trim areas on the template, as they show where text would be cut off.
-The front from this file can serve as the ebook cover (Jamie can cut it out) as long as it adheres to the guidelines above regarding text and scaling.
-DVD covers can be printed with the same file, but the spine will probably be different. So it's very important to make the spine text small so we can change the size as needed.