Potato is yum

So yeah, you might have seen that I commissioned a cover for my book. I’ll outline the whole process here since I feel like this might be helpful for others who wish to take their first steps towards self publishing. I’ll start this by describing why you should self publish rather than go through a publisher when starting out as an author.

1. You suck at writing. Chances are, no publisher will want the first book you write. Your best bet is to write a bunch of crap, find something that works, then find a publisher. From my discussions with other authors it seems easier to push crap with self publishing until a publisher comes to you.
2. It’s not that hard to self publish a book. With websites like royal road it’s easier than ever with such a low barrier for entry there’s almost no loss with self publishing
3. All the costs of self-publishing are mostly incurred by choice. You can do everything yourself if you can’t afford it. Spending money just means you save your time to work on the stuff that actually matters, the book.

So my first step was to find a place to search for artists. My choice was vgen because it had a price range that I could afford ($100-500) and guaranteed I would get what I paid for as the site protects both me and the artist meaning I know I won’t get scammed.

The first thing to note is that you must pay for commercial use which often doubles the cost of a commission easily bringing the minimum cost of a full character cover up to $200 at minimum. The person that drew my cover is on the lower end of the cost range and did some incredible work for the amount I was paying. The general rule of thumb is that you get what you pay for. If you go to higher end websites and pay $1000-$1500 for a cover you’re almost guaranteed to get a much better result than me. Anyway, the first thing to do is make a little reference sheet with the parts of the cover you want.

The way I did it was using the program Krita and pasting in photos of stuff I hand drew or screen shoted from video games. You can probably tell by looking at my cover that the charge rifle from titanfall is there along with a bullpup rifle and a combat knife. All of these were pulled from screenshots of various game props and assets that I slapped onto an image.

When trying to think of the armor I gave the artist quite a bit of room to come up with something because I didn’t really know what colors/shapes would look right and figured that an artist would know more about that than me. I feel like handing off control over that aspect really turned out for the better since they drew something I wouldn’t have ever thought of.

The background is incredibly detailed and honestly blew me away and I basically only gave the 3D model of the Anvil Arrow from star citizen as the base inspiration for it along with the fact that the main character crashed the ship.

At the end I didn’t share any of my story or anything with the artist because it was slightly difficult to communicate through english which might be the reason why the price was lower than other artists. However, they did an amazing job and we didn’t really need to use much english when diagrams and arrows conveyed my wishes well enough.