Meredith Mansfield, Author

I do my own cover art. That’s something that’s often not recommended. And for good reason. I’ll show you one. This is my original cover art for my novella, “The Music Box”:

Now, let’s just be honest. It’s dreadful. Frankly, I’m surprised I ever sold a single copy. To be fair, this was only the third cover I ever made. And it was during a period when I couldn’t really afford to spend anything on cover art. Which is why I started making my own covers in the first place.

And I’ve made a concerted effort to get better at it. I actually enjoy making my own covers now.

This was the very last of those original, very bad covers left. And it’s past time I replaced it. But my problem was that I just couldn’t find an image I liked for this story. I finally turned up this one:

It’s a nice image if a little . . . gray. Book covers need to pop. So, I bought the image (the right to use it only cost $8.15. I really probably could have afforded it (if it had been available then) in the first place, but I wouldn’t have known what I needed to do to make it work.

Then I added color to the background and went ahead and added the title and my name:

(Those funny little dashed lines are because I snipped this while I was still working on the cover. I knew I wasn’t finished and I didn’t want to save because that would have merged the layers, like the text. You’ll see why in a little bit.)

Okay, but now I wasn’t happy with the white costumes. Hmm. So the next step:

(See how I changed the color of the text for my name? I couldn’t have done that if I’d let the layers get merged too soon.)

But now I don’t like him in white, either. And what is likely the final version:

Though I haven’t uploaded this one yet. I may want to do just a little bit of clean up first.