Finding those cover images!

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for Monday November 4, 2024.

After deciding on what your subject for the book will be, coming up with a name is one of the first items you have to decide on. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not so easy. And in spite of how brilliant a name you have come up with you also have an editor, who also has to think it’s brilliant. With my Great Lakes book, ‘Lighthouse and Lifesaving on the Great Lakes’, turned out to be a bit too much of a mouth full when they added the ‘lifesaving’ word to the title. Although to be fair, there was a chapter on the lifesaving stations. Ok my editor could have been right.

Next finding images for the front and back cover is the next really important task. You want the images to ‘sell’ the content inside the book to the public, as that front image is really one of the first things you see. And for the author, you are going to be looking at that cover for a long time to come. With Arcadia’s Images of America Series, you have to use images that will be the entire cover and their are requirements as to how big the main image is and is there room for the title where it’s not covering an important part of the image. I have been fortunate as they usually ask for 5 or 6 choices for them to choose, when any one who knows me, can pretty much figure, this is going to be my choice, and they have never turned me down with my choice. As in the farming book below, nothing could have been better to do a book on farming families than use the image of Mr Schoenherr and his son on their tractors!

When I moved on to work on their Postcard History Series for my lighthouse series, these covers had different requirements. One image for the front and one image for the back cover, and they have to be styled as horizontal no vertical at all.

These covers have the look of the postcards that are to be used as the images to tell your stories. I have found with each of these previous lighthouse books finding the correct images to use was hardly an issue, as Arcadia prefers RPPC (Real Photo Postcards), oppose to linen types, that have a texture. They want them as sharp as can be, and they want an image that fills the area correctly from a photographic point of view. No problem with these three previous books, plenty to choose from that pretty much meet all the requirements need.

Now working on the ‘Lighthouses of the Southern Atlantic and Gulf States’, my problems started! After finishing the North Atlantic book, I would have gone on to the Southern Atlantic next, but finding the postcards I needed over a period of two years was more difficult than any of the other areas I would search in. Never figured out why, as the lighthouses in the southern and gulf states are as magnificent as any where else in the country, and when I did find them they didn’t always meet the correct requirements for the cover images. Until I settled on these two.

These two images have been submitted to my editor, and I should see the new cover along with my written material for the back cover in the next few weeks. Fingers crossed. Your covers front and back will sell your book, will it make people want to look beyond that cover to see what is inside? The hope is, it will.

On that ‘wee note’ till next month, Monday December 2, 2024.

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