Cover Stories review by Sherryl Clark

(Speaker: Illustrator, Lisa Allen, hosted by SCBWI New Zealand)


I was looking forward to this session – the one thing I know about cover design as an author is that I really have no idea. Not just about design elements, but also about trends and what attracts readers to pick up a book.
Lisa’s session was so informative and clear! Lots of great information about the foundations of design – how we read, how our eyes track across a cover (or a page), what different colours signify, and all the parts of a cover. Spines are so important. I have seen several self-published books with the title and author going the wrong way. The full cover needs to include the blurb and barcode on the back. One of my favourite things in the session was seeing how some children’s book designers have made the barcode into something with fun.
I enjoyed all the cover samples, and seeing how design has changed over the years. There were so many useful bits of advice that I am going to go back and watch the recording as well. I’ve seen a wide range of webinars over the past few years, and this was one of the best. Well done, Lisa and SCBWI NZcrew. (Especially for soldiering on when there was a tech problem at the start.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Register for a Region on the SCBWI website

Image
written by Heather Haylock The international SCBWI website has been overhauled recently, but we are having some issues with things having ‘fallen off’ during the transition.   The new website allows members to ‘register’ for multiple regions - but the committee doesn’t get a separate ‘New Zealand based members only’ list. This means, if we are trying to organise a get-together in a particular town or region, we have to manually sort through the list of all people (all over the world!) who have registered as being interested in what the NZ region is doing. There are some advantages to being able to follow other regions (such as seeing what events are coming up if you are planning a trip to another part of the world). But it is essential, if you want to receive newsletters, etc., from the NZ Committee, that you check you have registered for NZ.  If you don’t register for the NZ Region, we won’t know you are a member. Members (both new and existing) need to go to the website and look at t
Read more

Public Lending Rights - Where are we up to? by Sherryl Clark

Public Lending Rights - Where are we up to? As one of the new NZSA reps on the PLR committee, and having the wonderful experiences of also being the recipient of PLR and ELR in Australia (as a dual citizen), I was keen to see what was happening and what we could change, for the better. The depressing answer is – not much, and especially not for children’s writers and illustrators. The main issue for us in the children’s book world, I think, is that school libraries are not included in the library book surveys carried out. As there is no separate Educational Lending Right scheme, like there is in Australia, it’s not a surprise that many children’s authors and illustrators feel pretty disgruntled about PLR. The biggest problem, I discovered, is that PLR is still operating under the original legislation passed in Parliament in 2008, and this legislation is very limiting in its scope. It applied originally to mainly analogue publishing and is now way out of date, given e-books and audioboo
Read more

Self-Publishing Picture Books Webinar by Sherryl Clark

Self-Publishing Picture Books Webinar   This was put on by SCBWI Tasmania branch in Australia, and was a great example of how easy it is for our SCBWI members to make the most of all that is on offer via our organization. The main speaker was Frances Mackay, who told us she started a small publishing company in the UK originally, and then continued with the publishing when she moved to Tassie. Her website is at https://www.francesmackay.com/  You will see that she does very colourful books, quite a few activity books and some picture books. It was really interesting to see her comparison of the costings of two picture books, one where she paid a professional illustrator who was also able to do all the design of her book (that was about $10,000) and the other was a shorter simple counting book where she bought illustrations from an online site and then negotiated with the American illustrator for a few more. She then also had to pay for page design and to create print-ready files. The b
Read more