Tag Archives: book cover

Designing the cover for my new children’s book – Generation Moon

It’s time to think about the cover design for my new middle-grade space adventure trilogy – Generation Moon.

This is a first go at it to see what happens. Often, a first attempt looks terrible, so you try everything else. But, eventually, you tend to come back to the first idea.

In this video I show you how I adapt sketches to fit the idea and then begin to manipulate them in photoshop.

Of course, I completely changed my mind and started all over again, but you’ll have to see the next video for that!

How to design a Children’s Book Cover

I am relaunching my Scaredy Cats KickStarter project see it here – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shoorayner/scaredy-cats-funny-scary-stories-for-children

One thing that bothered me, once I had launched previously, was the cover. I loved it, but after a while I realised that it was probably not the right cover. The style of the cat on the front of the book, did not fit with the illustrations inside.

Publishers often recover books with different styles, but I thought maybe it was also a bit too sophisticated for the age group the books are intended for and said something different to what was inside.

So I spent some time trying to do a watercolour version, but couldn’t get that right. In the end I decided to do a hybrid. Take the elements I loved about the first cover and add them to a physically drawn version.

The moral of the tale is that the first drawing is not necessarily the finished version. You can keep tweaking the design and a little time and distance is good – allowing you to see the design with free eyes.