Thank you so much for having me today! It’s been a crazy week, and I think I’ve talked everyone’s ear off about THE KRAKEN KING, my steampunk romance serial novel (the first part is now available!). The pimping Force is not strong within me – a few days of promo and I’m ready to crawl back into my cave, crying.
But dorkery and Photoshop? Oh, I can do that forever. So let’s talk about covers and kraken!
The very best thing about writing a serial novel is that my publisher creates EIGHT covers to go along with it. Okay, and I’ll admit – I was a little afraid that the covers wouldn’t be super awesome, because photo shoots are expensive, and it always seems that all of the good stock photos for steampunk have been used on other covers. But then my editor sent me the first two and I think I cried. In a good way.
Check these babies out:
(And that’s not the hero in Part IV! He resembles the villain far more.)
So the funny thing about these covers is that, aside from the first cover (with the exploding airship) they don’t really accurately reflect the characters or setting of the book. Yet I don’t care a bit! They are so fun, and the colors are so gorgeous – and it’s clear that these are steampunk novels – I just love them like crazy.
But I also thought they could be even more fun … because an exploding airship is all and good, but when you can actually make it look like it’s on fire? That’s a million times better. Right?
So I decided that when each part of the serial was released, I’d post a little animated version of the cover along with it. I’ve got the first four here with me today.
(This is kind of an Arts & Crafts post, but I won’t include a long-winded tutorial about animating a cover -- mostly because on YouTube you can find much, much, much better tutorials than I could ever give. I just like to play with Photoshop; I’m definitely not a guru.)
Mostly I just want to share the pretties!
The first thing that I had to decide was HOW MUCH should I animate? For covers, I think it’s always best just to highlight one little aspect of the artwork, or add one little thing. Too much and it just becomes a distracting mess.
So for each cover, I let myself pick one thing. For Cover #1 (my personal favorite) this was harder than it should have been. I couldn’t decide whether to mess with the airship or the tentacle!
Eventually though, the airship won out, because the fire is a bit more eye-catching. Animating this one ended up being super easy after I found a looping series of fire images online. All I had to do was position the flames.
This one ended up with the most frames – and at one point, I thought about tweening the different balloon layers (you can see that at the beginning of the animation, because I forgot to delete a few of the tweened frames) but then abandoned the idea.
For Covers #3 and #4, I turned to my readers and asked them for ideas. Both covers have windows, of a sort, so I thought it would be fun to put something outside those windows. They gave me a ton of awesome and funny suggestions – rubber duckies, airships, a clip from the movie The Shining, when Jack Nicholson burst through the door with an ax, and so many more.
In the end, I decided on two that would be simple enough for me to do and that also related to the book in some way. (Though I’m still tempted by that rubber ducky!) So for Cover #3, I went with a zombie:
And in Cover #4, I finally got my tentacle.
The tentacle was by far the most difficult one – I’m still not happy with it on a technical level (although I still think it’s a lot of fun on a visual level.) I’d hoped to be able to make it seem to curl into the porthole, rather than just behind it, but the stock photo I chose didn’t work quite as well as I’d envisioned.
Of course, now I’ve got four more to do. What would you add to Covers #5 & #6, if you had a chance? Can you think of a favorite cover that would be fun with just a hint of animation? (And here are some others from different genres, if you’d like to see more! http://ebookfriendly.com/best-animated-book-covers/)
So I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did – and thank you so much again to Sharon for inviting me!
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About the Author:
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Meljean was raised in the middle of the woods, and hid under her blankets at night with fairy tales, comic books, and romances. She left the forest and went on a misguided tour through the world of accounting before focusing on her first loves, reading and writing–and she realized that monsters, superheroes, and happily-ever-afters are easily found between the covers, as well as under them, so she set out to make her own.
Meljean lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter.
Meljean was raised in the middle of the woods, and hid under her blankets at night with fairy tales, comic books, and romances. She left the forest and went on a misguided tour through the world of accounting before focusing on her first loves, reading and writing–and she realized that monsters, superheroes, and happily-ever-afters are easily found between the covers, as well as under them, so she set out to make her own.
Meljean lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughter.
GIVEAWAY
one US winner will get a poster of the covers!
