Indie Primer... Useful Things to Know

A Guest Post by L. Jagi Lamplioghter

Today, a guest post from L. Jagi Lamplighter with advice for indie authors wanting their books to stand out from the crowd.

“I work so hard, but no one will take my efforts seriously!”

Ah, the great cry of the indie author. True, a few indie authors break out, but for the majority of us, it is a massive uphill fight. While there is nothing we can do to ensure we succeed, there are things that we can do to decrease our chances of abject failure.

Here are a few simple things you can do to lessen the strikes against your book:

Covers:

The first thing to take a good look at is: your cover.

Purpose:

The primary purpose of a cover is to catch the eye and tell the reader what genre the story is. It is like a road sign or a hieroglyph, indicating the basics: fantasy, urban fantasy, sf, horror, etc.

This is of extreme importance. My first book came out from the big NY SF and Fantasy publisher, Tor. It had a really lovely cover. Everyone who saw it commented on how beautiful it was…but a miscommunication i-house led to the image being of the wrong genre for the book.

The result? People who picked up the book expecting the cover image genre (it looked a bit like the cover of another book that was a big hit at the time but was nothing like it) were disappointed. It was not like the book they had just read and liked.

While reviews years later praising the book occasionally indicated that it had been the cover that had put the readers off from reading it earlier.

You can see the two covers convey very different genres—attracting different kinds of readers

So it is very important that your cover indicate the kind of story the reader can expect.

It is much less important that the cover be accurate. Readers might grouse later if some cover element is not accurate, but they picked up the book and read it!

Occasionally, it is wise to put images on the front that are inaccurate to the story but correct for the genre, particularly if the correct-to-the-story element might mislead the reader as to the nature of the story.

Example:

On the first cover for the Books of Unexpected Enlightenment, we decided to give the main character a regular broom, not the bristleless broom described in the story, because otherwise, the cover might look like steampunk or sf rather than a magic school story. But on the cover of the third book, the bristleless was portrayed correctly—both because there were many other fantasy elements and because returning readers would already know the genre.

Readers who like indie books don’t care that much about covers, I believe. They know that the cover may be a work in progress. They’ve heard good things, and they will give the book a change. Sadly, this does not apply to any other readers.

The number one turn off to regular readers when they look at an indie book is a bad cover. This rule of thumb becomes doubly so if the reader has been burned before, i.e. if they have tried an indie book in the past and had it turn out to be horrendous. There are a lot of bad books out there. Without gatekeepers, nothing keeps them from getting published. Once readers read a bad indie book or two, they become really leery to try again.* And bad indie books often have bad covers.

So while a good cover does not insure success; a bad cover definitely makes things worse.

But, you say, I don’t have much means available, and even with a good cover, I won’t sell many books, what can I do? Here are a few pointers that can help make a cover look just a little better:

1) Avoid Distorted Figures—figures that are distorted or out of proper proportion stand out to the eye. No Big House book ever has a figure in poor proportions on the cover. This is an instant red flag to many readers.

2) Bad Photoshops—poor quality photoshops also stand out to the eye, but these are sometimes easier to fix. Many times, what stands out is either sharp edges that do not look natural or a different quality of photograph—where one element is, say, shiny and the next is not.

Certain photoshop tricks can go a long way toward lessening the degree to which these elements jar the reader’s eye. They include:

Universal Lighting—using tools such Levels or Curves, you can adjust the brightness so that the light quality seems to be similar on all objects. The Dodge/Burn tool is invaluable for fixing things like too shiny or too bright. It can give the whole image a similar image quality.

If you are unfamiliar with these elements, a simple internet search can tell you how to use them, often with videos.

Blending Sharp Outlines—The clone stamp is an invaluable tool. It allows you to memorize part of an image and copy it to another part of the image. If you have an object with a sharp outline, say a figure of a woman who is starkly different from the sky behind her, you can put your clone stamp right next to the woman on the sky. Then, moving the clone stamp to the woman, you can add the blue of the sky right beside her to the very edge of her figure.

As you move the clone stamp, it will move in relationship to where your started it, so you can move around the figure tinging the very edge of it the same color as the background. (Sometimes, this can be done in one motion. Sometimes, you have to stop and start, doing small sections of the figure at a time If the figure and the background are on different levels, you can memorize the background on one level, and then move to the figure’s level and the color from the other level will come onto the second level. This can be a bit annoying to get right, but once you get it properly lined up, it works just fine.)

The result is that, from a distance, the figure now looks as if it actually fits into the same environment as the background and no longer has a sharp outline that draws the reader’s eye.

I am by no means a photoshop expert. What I have shared here are merely a few tricks I have learned through playing with the program. A little time spent familiarizing yourself with Photoshop though practice and tutorials can go a long way.

[For anyone who wishes to use an AI to create a cover, a bit of familiarity with photoshop can go a long way towards making an otherwise creepy AI cover into one that is pleasing to the eye.]

3) Lettering—I once spent a long time looking back and forth between professional and indie books trying to figure out why the second did not look as good as the first. I realized that, in many cases, it was the lettering. But since different professional books looked fine with different kinds of fonts, I could not tell what was making these particular indie books look so bad.

The secret was revealed to me by my cover artist, a professional graphic artist who had once drawn for Marvel and DC. He explained that the image and the lettering must look as if they were meant to go together. The lettering should fit to the image. This does not mean that the lettering cannot cover any part of the cover illustration, but that it should not obscure important elements and should be shaped as to show respect to them.

(For an example, see how the lettering on the cover above looks as if it was meant to be in the same image as the raven and the angel’s wing.)

It is amazing what a difference this simple rule makes when putting a cover together.

4) Thumbnail—the final issues is: Can the elements of the cover be made out at different sizes? Some covers look great in large size but cannot be made out at all in thumbnail size. While sometimes, there is nothing one can do about the smallest size, at least make sure that it will be comprehendible in the sizes that appear regularly on Amazon.

While some images just don’t work at the smaller sizes, the real culprit here is often the font chosen for the lettering. Make sure the font you choose is at least somewhat legible once the cover is reduced to Amazon sizes.

Blurbs:

If the cover catches the readers’ attention, the next thing they look at is the description of the story.

Purpose

Purpose: to catch the reader’s interest.

A blurb is not a book review. It is not the place you record every single thing that happens in the book. Authors think the purpose of their blurb is to describe what happens…but a blurb is a marketing tool, a place to hook your reader.

Unlike a cover, however, you do not want any element in your blurb that is not true, but in no way does it need to reflect the whole book. Many blurbs only deal with the situation at the beginning of the book and then perhaps a hint of what to come.

A blurb basically needs to serve the same purpose as the opening paragraph…to hook the reader. It has to interest the reader and then pose enough uncertainty that the reader wants to find out the rest by reading the book.

How to do it:

Full disclosure, I may be the worst blurb writer on the planet. But I have received some good pointers from a few people who are good at writing blurbs. Here’s what I have learned:

Jon Del Arroz of Fandom Pulse writes dynamic blurbs. He recommends the following:

A bold description seven words or less

Two to three paragraphs of two to three sentences each that describes your story and includes a hook, ending with a sentence that compares the work to a well-known work the reader might recognize and a call to action. He says the reason that YouTubers always remind you to hit Like and subscribe is that people don’t remember to do it if they are not reminded. Same thing with buying a book. Even on Amazon, a call to action gets more sales.

“If you like (big author or movie, etc.) you will love (name of book.)”

So buy it now. Or Read it today.

As to what to put in the two to three paragraphs, Author Jane Lebak, blurb-writer extraordinaire, recommends:

MAIN CHARACTER is {describe steady state} until {this thing happens to change stuff.}

Now he has to {whatever} or else {bad thing} will happen.

Stopping him is THIS THING.

THIS is what will happen if he fails.

THIS BAD THING is what might happen if he succeeds.

So, again, keep your blurb pithy and easy to read. Include a hook. Add a dramatic opening line and a call to action, and while you might not convert everyone who reads it to a reader, at least you won’t be shooting yourself in the foot.

Doing these two things, improving your covers and your blurbs, will go a long way to giving your indie book the best chance it could have.

*--It was watching readers be turned off by bad books that inspired me to make The Art and Craft of Writing book and videos. If bad books make readers not interested in reading, and good books make readers eager to read more—which seems to be the case—the number one best thing we can all do to get more readers is…help all our fellow authors improve.

The videos are free to homeschoolers if you contact me at arhyalon@gmail.com. Otherwise, you can see them all by subscribing to my Substack:

Here is one that is available to the public, if you want to take a look:

The Trouble With Tropes

Support the Based Book Sale, but maybe not quite enough to spring for a paid subscription?
Then click on the button below to buy me a coffee. Thanks!