Changing the Covers

I use GIMP to do covers.  At least I do when I don’t hire out for them.  It’s pretty powerful, and the price was right – FREE!

Over the last year and a half I’ve learned a lot about how GIMP works, and I like to think I’ve gotten a lot better at covers.  Certainly the cover for The Necromancer’s Lair is pretty good, IMHO.  This one also is pretty good.  It’s for a novelette called The Suspect’s Wife.  I wrote it under my Mystery pen name, Alex Mariner, and released it last month.

I like it because it’s simple and to the point.

Now that said, some of my older covers REALLY suck.  I modified a few of them a little while back.  And while those modifications were improvements from the originals, looking at them now, some of them are still pretty weak.

Problem is, though I’ve learned a lot about how to use GIMP by trial and error, my knowledge is still fairly elementary.  Or rather, was.  A few days ago, I found a great GIMP tutorial site that gives step by step instructions in how to do a lot of cool stuff, some simple and some complex.  Just reading through a few of the tutorials showed me how to better use a number of GIMP’s features, in particular layer manipulation and text effects.  So last night, I decided to work on the cover for Lords of the Remnant, one of my earlier short stories.  I like the story, but frankly, the original cover was lacking.  Here are the results:

The original cover:  

And the new one:    

I think this new one is about a 1000% improvement over the original.  I’m sure there are more ways to improve it, but I like it a lot.  I think I’ll be re-working the rest of my early covers over the next several months.  Stay tuned for the results.

In the meantime…

Lords of the Remnant.  A fun science fiction short story, now with a more fun cover.  It’s feeling lonely, though.  You should go say hi to it, check it out.  🙂  And while you’re at it, say hi to it’s cousin, The Suspect’s Wife.  You’ll be happy you did.  🙂