Thursday, November 3, 2016

NaNoWriMo and Book Covers

We're now a couple days into National Novel Writing Month, an annual challenge to write 50,000 words during the month of November. I've completed the challenge for the last four years and have served as my region's municipal liaison for the last three. We are told that participants who complete their novel profile on the challenge website are more likely to win and to finish their novels. So as part of my pre-writing (a.k.a. procrastination) I created covers for the novel I planned to write.
The story revolves around a gay dating app that becomes the platform for a resistance movement in a future where support for the LGBT community disappears. I imagined the cover would feature a smartphone displaying the app's icon.
The first version was completed on Microsoft Paint with clip-art and the paint feature. I was pretty happy with it, but Paint has a tendency to reduce the quality of images if you look at it wrong. Beck Muth, a writer in my NaNoWriMo region, suggested using Canva, a website for editing images. It had templates for crating book covers and in very little time I created the second version of my cover. I wondered how it would look if I added pictures in a grid, like a dating app might display, so I took some free images from Pixabay.com and pieced together the third version.


So, what do you think? Do any of them peak your curiosity enough that you'd flip it over and read the blurb or maybe download a sample onto your e-reader? I appreciate an feedback.

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