Cover Art

This is just a fun lesson for the last week of class.  You don't have any assignments.  But I thought you might like to learn a bit about how to design a book cover!  Just in case you want to play around with designing covers for something you write at some point.

First, here's a video that may help you a bit as you consider your cover art.  She's talking about book publishing toward the end, but most of her info is solid for anyone wanting to make a cover, even just for fun.

Next, I'll share what I've learned from working with my graphic designer on the covers for my own books, from taking an online class on good cover art design, and from discussing these sorts of things with other indie authors. 

+ Don't use more than two fonts on the cover.  Using different fonts for the title and the author/illustrator's names is fine, but don't use more than two.

+ Your fonts should reflect the book genre somehow.  My books are westerns, so they have a western-y font.  Fantasy gets swirly letters.  Rom-coms get whimsical or handwritten-looking letters.  Sci-fi gets pointy and angular letters.  And so on!

+ It's totally fine for the author name to be almost as big as the title.  You won't have to worry about this so much, since we're not selling your book, but in real life, your author name ought to be readable at thumbnail size on a phone or tablet so people can read it while searching through websites.  Same for your title.

+ Your cover should be separated roughly into thirds from top to bottom and from left to right.  Like this:

See how each of those nine sections has a focus?  And how one of the corner spots draws your eye more than anything else?  That creates interest and makes your eye sort of move over the cover in almost a spiral, taking in the moon, traveling down the tree to the author name, then going up to the girl and on way up to the title.  Here's another example:

The arch of the dog's body naturally makes you start at the bottom with the author name, swoop up along the dog with the title, and wind up at the big orange circle of a moon.

This one is much more side-to-side, with a big middle third going one way and a skinny middle third going another that keeps you focused on the title, but still makes you go around from it to the author name and back up to the door knocker.

Last one.  Notice how all of these put the most interesting thing on the cover in one of the corners.  Not in the center.  You've got a girl with a cape and wind-blown hair in this one, the door-knocker, the dog's head, and the pensive girl, each in a corner to hold onto your interest after you're done looking at the whole thing.  Not entirely sure why this works, but it DOES, and you'll start to notice this on covers a lot now, I expect.

Thanks for being such fun writing students this semester!  If you have any questions about the course, drop them in a comment here or on any of the other posts.  I'll be leaving this blog classroom up indefinitely. 

Revising Flash Fiction Story Two

Time to revise your final piece of writing for the semester!  Or... it will be as soon as I get you your revision notes.  I was gone for 4 days, so I am a smidgeon behind on life right now.  I will adjust your due dates according to when I get your notes back to you.

Flash Fiction -- Story Two

And now, it's time to write another flash fiction story!

Once again, include a teen protagonist and include a moment that changes everything.

This week, I've got some fun prompts for you, but if you don't like them, you can make something up on your own!

The prompts:

• A girl discovers she can talk to animals 
• A boy gets an elephant for a pet 
• Ducks start following a superhero everywhere 
• A mummy comes back to life inside a museum
• A guardian angel gets lost 
• A kid digs up a skeleton at the beach 
• A pizza delivery guy’s car gets stolen 
• Someone steals the hippo from the zoo  
• A pirate loses his wooden leg

This story is due Friday, May 8.  Once again, I will get you feedback over the weekend and then you will have the following week to revise your story.

Revising Flash Fiction Story One

This week, focus on revising and polishing your story using the notes I gave you :-)

Flash Fiction -- Story One

Have you ever written -- or read -- flash fiction?

And, what is “flash fiction” anyway? 

It’s a short story told in 1,000 words or fewer. A whole story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Character development, setting, problems, and a solution. In about two pages.  If you tend to write short (like me), that's not daunting.  If you tend to write long, it's a bigger challenge.

So, what do you need in order to write a flash fiction story? You need: 

1. A beginning that introduces a character that readers will care about, something that character wants or needs, and whatever problem is stopping that character from getting what they want/need. 
   
   
2. A middle where the problem gets worse. 
   
   
3. An ending where the character beats or solves the problem and gets (or gets closer to) their want/need… or where they fail and get farther away from what they want/need. 
   
   
4. A reason why you wrote the story AND why your reader wants to read it. You want to leave your reader thinking, “Wow! That was awesome/scary/funny/shocking/uplifting. I’m so glad I read that.” 

Those are exactly the same things a longer story needs. And a novel. And a play. And a movie or a TV show episode. Anything fictional needs all those things. The tricky part of flash fiction is that you have very, very few words in which to work all that magic. 

But that’s also the fun part. When you don’t have room for lots of details, lots of worldbuilding, a complicated plot, or lots of character development, you have to narrow your focus a lot. Flash fiction is like a single photo instead of a whole movie.  Think of writing it as more like the process of writing poetry -- keep your focus small and tight.

If you haven't read much flash fiction before, and you want to wrap your head around how a story that small can be good, then I advise you to read the spring issue of Sparkler right here.

That's an especially good idea because you are going to be writing two flash fiction stories for this class, and I want you each to submit one of them to Sparkler.  Their summer issue is for teen writers only!  And I think submitting a story to a real magazine will be a good experience for you both, whether or not you get a story accepted.

The theme for that issue is "The Moment That Changed Everything" which is a pretty wide-open theme, since most really short stories will hinge on a moment where everything changes.  The stories also need to be YA fiction, so you need to write a teen protagonist.

This week, I'd like you to write a complete story about a teen in 1,000 words or less using one of these settings:

• The circus
• The mall
• Washington, DC
• A summer camp for teens whose parents are spies
• The library
• Walmart
• Yellowstone National Park

Choose one of those settings, come up with a teen main character, figure out what they want/need, make up the problem in their way, and focus on the moment everything will change... for the better or the worse.  

This first story is due this Friday, April 24.  I'll get you some feedback over the weekend, and you can revise it next week.

Then we'll repeat that process in May.  And then you'll have two revised and polished stories to choose from when submissions open for Sparkler on June 2!