Last week I blogged about what size you need to get your artist to provide you to meet distributor requirements. This week I’ll be talking about the additional requirements you need to consider, including how it displays as a thumbnail, and ensuring that it works in black and white. I will also be supply a helpful html page that you can download to your computer to see how your cover works at various sizes.

This time I’ll be using the cover of Frontier Incursion by Leonie Rogers. The design is by talented Australian artist and illustrator Emma Llewelyn.

The first picture shows the cover of Frontier Incursion in all its glory. The typeface used for the text is Vani. Looks good doesn’t it.

Frontier Incursion Colour 200×300

One of the first things is to then check that the design works well in black and white as this appears as the ‘cover’ on the ebook. OK still good.

Frontier Incursion B&W 200×300

The next stage is to make sure its recognisable at the thumbnail used by Amazon.com (84×135), and this is where it got messy as the type started to disappear into the picture – see following.

Frontier Incursion 84×135 (Original)

The way we got round it was to convert the typeface into a heavier, blockier text and provide it with some shadow. In this case we selected Cambria (bold) as the typeface.

Frontier Incursion 84×135 (Enhanced Text)

If you want to download the simple html script I use to check how the picture works at various sizes, including in Goodreads, Google, Apple, and Amazon you can download it here:

[wpdm_file id=1 ]

The zip file includes instructions.

Next week I’ll be getting a little more ‘arti’, and walking you through the three stage process we used to produce the cover for Shelley Davidow’s “Lights Over Emerald Creek”.