The birth of the cover of my book.

I cannot paste images into this post but these images can be seen at https://liveforeverhowto.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/the-holy-grail-of-book-launching-how-the-cover-came-about/

The Holy Grail of Book Launching
The birth of a cover

The Holy Grail of Book Launching by Mimi Emmanuel will be discounted on Amazon during the Holiday season.

I like to explain how the cover came about.
I asked my daughter to come up with a cover. She makes all my covers for me. She is GREAT!

She did an amazing job and I loved what she came up with. It looked like this.

So why didn’t we go with this cover?
We didn’t use this cover because we couldn’t get it right.

What? It was right, yes? Well no.
One of the final steps before publishing is to make the cover thumbnail size to see what it looks like on Amazon and this beautiful cover looked like this thumbnail size.

Mmm, see what I mean? It didn’t work. We couldn’t read the word ‘Grail.’ So it needed adjusting.

My daughter then set out to create the following covers to make the wording stand out more.
These covers turned out marginally better but lost the elegance of the original cover.

I said, to my daughter, ‘How hard can it be to make this cover suited for Amazon.’ Just DO something, you know, colour, font, size, I dunno, make it work!’

She said, ‘Sure Mum. How about these?’

And these?

Talented kid huh?

But I liked the first one best, the turquoise coloured one, cause I thought it looked ‘elegant.’

I even had people vote on these covers but I just couldn’t get happy about it.

Hmmphh. Now what? Any of those covers would do, but I just didn’t ‘feel’ it.

My daughter said, ‘Mum, what do you want? What do you like? Why don’t you google ‘covers’ and see what comes up. When you see one you like, show it to me and I’ll take it from there.’

I didn’t really know what I liked other than I like ‘retro’ and ‘chalkboard.’

So I asked ‘Google Images’ and ‘Stock Unlimited’ and ‘Canva’ to show me ‘retro,’ vintage’ and ‘chalk board.’

Two images came up that I liked. Now we have inspiration. All credit to the creators of these images. I couldn’t find their names.

We then sat down, together this time, and played in www.canva.com for a night and came up with this.

I liked it!
BUT, I did not feel that it carried the kind of authority that I believe came with the title.

Also, once more, it did not read great, once we turned it into a thumbnail.

Launch date was getting closer and closer and we still did not have a cover.

My daughter said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll sort it,’ as she trotted off to do her volunteer coaching.

But I was worried because it had taken us months to get to this point and launch was now only weeks if not days away and I do not ‘do’ stress very well.

So, on my own this time I went back into the http://www.canva.com portal, thinking ‘BIG CLEAR FONTS’ and ‘I like vintage.’

I tested out each and every font on Canva and then gave my arms and shoulders rest till my daughter came home and showed her this cover.

Together we played a bit more and came up with this clearer and sharper picture.

After this I asked my daughter if she could take the image to Photoshop and enter the text of the subtitle in the little book symbol.

Another day we said down together once more and created the covers for the three volumes on the inside of the book.

And finally my daughter went to http://www.covervault.com to download a free 3D template to create a graphic for the three volumes.
Birth of the cover for the Holy Grail of Book Launching

A few people have asked how the covers came about and I thought to share the process.
It literally took us nearly 6 months working on these, on and off to get to the final covers. Love um or hate um, this is it.

You can find my tutorial on how to create an infographic on canva here.
Remember to get your Discounted copy from Amazon visiting https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Grail-Launching-step-step-ebook/dp/B01NBAYM0L.