Though I like the original cover very much, I sternly believe that when I release it, I will redesign it. The graphics and imagery are exactly as I originally intended, but I feel that on it’s own, it doesn’t hold a place against other books of a similar, or even a different genre.
The actual design work was produced using two packages. I used Inkscape to layout the banner, the sword and the title lettering, whilst using Scribus to do the blurb lettering. Why do it this way you ask? Simply because I could not export the drop shadow on the title lettering to a PDF using Inkscape. PDF just doesn’t handle the shadows at all. I didn’t want the blurb text being affect by being rasterised to a bitmap, as the banner et al had to be, so
I took the decision to export the majority as an image using Inkscape, and then to put the blurb text on in Inkscape and save as a PDF. The resulting file worked very well at lulu.com and only a very small imperfection can be noticed in some of the lettering. On the book itself, it looks every bit as good as I hoped and to be fair, though not an outstanding cover, the combination with lulu.com’s great printing has left many people aghast at the similarity to a ‘real book’.
The book’s cover was actually designed and created as a single page. Lulu.com does have a “cover designer” but for my tastes and because I knew exactly what I wanted the cover to look like, this was just not an option. Luckily Lulu.com offer a page showing all of the dimensions you need to work to, whilst designing the cover. During the creation process the text document is uploaded and from this, the size of the spine is calculated. This is then presented to you so you can split the working design page up into back cover on the left, spine in the middle and front cover on the right. It worked flawlessly.
It should be noted here that all of the design work, and the text work come to that, was created using free software. It’s even more of a point to note that the three software packages used, Inkscape, Scribus and OpenOffice, are all available on Windows as well as Linux. I feel really proud of the fact that I could produce everything using free and open source software, something that I strive to do wherever possible.
