New Covers for Fanfiction.net

Hi Ink Drinkers,

I started posting fanfiction on fanfiction.net when I was in my early twenties.  That was a really long time ago.   In those days, fanfiction.net did not have a function to give your book a cover, so when I was posting my Vision of Escaflowne and Slayers fanfic, I did not need a cover.  It's also fanfic, so if you want images to support your book, you either need to make fanart or get a little bit thiefy.  They didn't introduce the function to add a cover until I was very tired of trying to keep up with any fandom at all.  I'm not really much of a fan anyway.  The truth about my fanfiction is that most of it is not really fanfiction.  It is original fiction and I gave the characters the same names from the shows and called it 'alternative universe fanfiction' so that I could bum off the show's audience.  It worked well until the shows got too old and I couldn't really piggyback off them anymore.  

I'd forget all about my fanfiction roots, except occasionally, I go to fanfiction.net and look at my stunning stats.  At my peak, I was getting 50 people to write in when I released a chapter each week.  The hit counts are so gorgeous, it nearly blinds me to see them.  And the stats actually just keep going up over time.

Returning to the subject of the covers... I was really lazy.  Shamefully lazy.  I was using the cover of His 16th Face as the cover for every single book and for my profile picture to try to generate some interest in that book.  I don't think it worked.  Not only that but each one of those projects deserves a cover of its own.  So, yesterday, I got all chipper and created new covers for my fanfic, without getting theify, which means that they are somewhat generic, but I didn't steal anything, so good.  

I used Adobe Express, which is a free service where you can pay extra to unlock the awesome features.  When I say the 'awesome features', I mostly mean fonts.  The free fonts pretty much suck, but since everything else Adobe offers in the free version is top-notch, I just ignore the lack of diversity of fonts.  

Let's begin.

When you're designing a cover for a platform like this, you do not have a quarter of the design freedom that you do when you design an actual book cover.  The pixel count is 600x800 instead of 1600x2500.  Yes, those are not the same shape, but with the smaller image, it will always be displayed as a thumbnail--just a tiny little thing.  This means that there isn't room to have a detailed conversation with the audience about what they're going to get.  You are unwise to use more than two people in the picture and actually, just one central image of only one person is better.  You also can't have taglines, reviews, or any other words besides the name of the book and the pen name.  Basically, the size of the images you are seeing here is massive compared to the way they will be displayed on the actual webpage.

Adobe Express lets you use a variety of design elements for free with thousands of shapes that you can stack on top of each other and if you're clever and appreciate the intense beauty of a chess board, you can have quite a lot of fun.

You're noticing the lack of font diversity, aren't you?  The thing that is the most painful about the free fonts is that they don't have any fonts that really sprawl all over the page.  You wouldn't use those for the whole title, but for the first letters of the title words.  Gah... there are ways to get around it.  Not by hacking it, but by moving the image to another site that has a stronger free font catalog.  However, when the image requirements are this small, a sprawling font is not going to help you.  You need something readable.    

I guess I'll tell you a bit about the books.  The most important book here is this one: Mystic Wings.  This was the twelfth novel I wrote and actually, it is the first novel I wrote that was not a steaming pile of crap.  I'm really happy that the simple cover for it turned out so well.  The book that follows it, Mark of a Goddess is perfectly fine.  I had really got the hang of writing by the time I wrote it.  And actually, nothing I have written since has been a steaming pile of crap.  Some projects work out better than others and sometimes I'm surprised at how many mistakes I make, but everything I have written since Mystic Wings has something about it that makes it good.  I'm so glad I didn't waste my time.

Now about the Shadow Magic books above, I'll tell you more about them.  They are not a series.  They have similar subject matter, but they are not connected to each other in any way and I have Zelgadis fall in love with Amelia in one and fall in love with Lina in another.  The one where he falls in love with Lina is my favorite of the Slayers fanfiction that I wrote that is still posted.  I wrote a scene in that book where Zelgadis allows himself to be impaled the long way (which means that he has a sword pierce straight down his vertebrae, breaking one after another).  Naturally, he doesn't die, but is reborn as a monster, and he becomes the perfect person to love Lina.

Ah... if I read it now, I would probably die of cringe.  But that was the first time I wrote something that really spoke to me.

Because I have 16 projects on Fanfiction.net, I can't post the new covers for all of them here.  I'll give you the link, so you can go discover them for yourself.  Yes, I was young when I wrote all those things.  Yes, you have to be stupid before you can be less stupid.  Enjoy!

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/586657/Sapphirefly