The Making of Zombie Turkeys Book Covers

I’ve had more positive comments for Zombie Turkeys book covers than for my book!  And my book is great! But just about everyone loves the covers, especially the front cover. I thought writing about how we made the Zombie Turkeys book covers would be interesting to my readers.

I’ve chatted with long time authors at Chabanacon and they too loved the cover. When I told them how we did it, they were envious that I as a self-published author had the freedom to do whatever I wished. Those who go through established publishing companies do not have complete control over their covers.

I’ve also talked with other self-published authors, who did make their own covers. These indie authors also loved Zombie Turkeys cover. They had purchased or made their artwork for their covers. They wished they had access to a professional artist, like I did.

 

How It All Began

As soon as I had a clear end date for editing (August 31st) I began talking with Sean Flanagan, my son’s friend since elementary school. Sean has developed his artistic skill and is now a professional artist. My original concept was to use a battle scene from the novel located at Chicago’s Navy Pier.

We met for a planning session with my daughter, who is a graphics designer. Sean liked my ideas, but he wanted a simpler front cover.

I did a search on all zombie books on Amazon and found he was right: the front covers were simpler and eye catching.

My first idea of a zombie turkey was this photoshop job:

It lacked something: eye appeal, maybe? Sean agreed to rough up some sketches for our meeting the following week.

 

The Second Week of Zombie Turkeys Book Covers

Sean came up with all these sketches:

I liked number 3 the best, but my artistic group liked 5 the best. I deferred to their better judgment.
We made that the final cover:

 

What About the Back Cover?

I hadn’t given up on my Navy Pier battle scene. We discussed what my characters Sam Melvin and Lisa Kambacher should look like. Sean came up with this for the first sketch of the back cover:

That was very close to the image I wanted. However, the scene in the book had them running up the stairs and looking down at turkeys pursuing them. So Sean reworked it to this:

What’s not said, is that Sean created twelve unique turkey images, each with complete detail, and then replicated them hundreds of times.  Here are some of them:

 

Finally, The Last “Minor” Details

You’d think we be done, with two detail, high resolution cover images? You’d be wrong!

The covers had to fit Createspace and Kindle’s separate and different image requirements–which I didn’t know. Also, I had to add the barcode I purchased from Bowker and my author name.

I worked with my layout editor Rik Hall to meet the requirements for Kindle and Createspace. Ingram printing had yet different requirements I had to mee. To make everything work, I had to put both covers and the spine and the bar code all together in one document. I used Microsoft Word with the full resolution images and then converted it to Adobe’s pdf format. That finally got the job done.

The End . . . But That’s Not All Folks!

I wasn’t done yet, nor was my artistic team. We also had to plan the chapter icons. But that’s a story for the next blog post.