Writing Tips - Book Covers

It was our first virtual Story Club. Since I’m currently in Houston, TX, and the rest of Story Club is in England, today’s writing workshop was on Zoom. We delved into book covers, an idea by Amani.
Coco gave a great presentation that highlighted what is on a book cover (title, author name, illustrator name as the basic elements, with the publisher’s name and a short sentence or review as optional elements).

She also pointed us to Canva and PlaceIt, two good websites with free options that are useful in creating book covers. They both have templates to play around with.
She came up with a pretty cool cover!

I talked about how I go about creating a title.
I used this strategy for my newest book, Element Girls 2:

• Write down nouns that are found in the story.

Trolls, Iceland, Star, West Star, Vesturstjarna, Elements, Magic, Fire, Water, Earth, Holiday, Friends

• Circle the ones I would like to have in the title. (These might jump out at me as being especially cool words, unique or something that might tempt the reader to pick up the book).
• Create one or more possible titles, often using alliteration or rhyme.

Using this strategy, I came up with:

• Element Girls 2 - The Stolen Star
• Element Girls 2 - The Terrible Trolls

I felt The Stolen Star was better — it evoked the mood of the book. I also asked others what they thought of the title, to make sure it wasn’t just me who liked it!
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Any of the words that didn’t end up in the title could be helpful to have in the cover design. For example, since Iceland is the setting of the story, and doesn’t appear in the title, I asked for a cool, blue, icelandic mountain on the cover. Karissa Bettendorf used that, the star, and the faces of the four girls to create her beautiful watercolor. The layout (text, font and placement) was all done by Nicki Hansen.

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Just a few words about the back cover too. It’s helpful to have a summary of the characters and their quest without giving too much away! Also, helpful to have some tempting sentences to evoke a mood of mystery …

Finally, I mentioned the book’s unique ID or fingerprint (the ISBN). A useful number to know when searching for a book on websites or bookstores!
It was a fun Story Club, and I loved a lot of the title and cover ideas that were coming through. Thanks everyone who attended!