So I reworked my series pages today and how they worked with my theme. I want to do more, but alas! I haven't solved PHP coding yet. In the meantime, every post in a series now displays the series icon, which was formerly relegated to the sidebar. Wait a second. Hold that thought. It what?!
Not all of my series icons made awesome book covers, to put it mildly, and the icon for The Creative Life was certainly not going to cut it as a book cover.
Book covers need to not only be appealing, but also legible as an icon and a good expression of what will be found inside. I created this book cover before I discovered the following article by Jordan Stratford, but read it. It's an excellent checklist and opens your eyes to exactly what I mean when I say "professional," as regards covers.
Your Cover is 40% of Your Sales goes through an entire checklist for book covers, covering the points that have been my main focus in redoing all of my own covers: genre colors, genre layout, large author name, large title, textured background, branded design.
Nonfiction
The Creative Life is essentially, at this point anyway, a series of essays. I wanted a bright, creative color, and ended up going for something that captured something of the essence of what that icon expresses to me: the idea of windows, of femininity, of brightness and sunshine, and of boxes divided or opened up. Some of this was done with the same kinds of elements, some with others, such as a script for the title's one article.
The first draft on the left almost worked, but the white was not legible at thumbnail size, so we deleted the tagline and made the title green. It worked.
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