New covers for Emily Dickinson, Superhero!

I re-made the covers for the new book! Why? Because they didn’t have high enough resolution. When I was submitting the book to Smashwords (they post the book at places like Barnes & Noble and iTunes), I got an error message saying the cover image had to be at least 1,200 pixels on the smallest side. My old cover was 600 pixels wide. When I looked at my source images for the background and the photo of Emily, I saw they were very small and the only way to get around this was to create a brand-new cover.

I was not happy about this because it took me untold hours to Photoshop out all of the nicks, scratches, and marks in the Emily photo. I downloaded a high-res photo of Emily and my heart sank: it was horribly scratched up. Like, really bad. I then spent about 14 hours cleaning it up and coming up with a new background image.

The old picture I used for the background was actually a puddle of laundry detergent that had spilled on a cork floor. I then tweaked the color of it. I had taken that photo four years ago with an older camera set on a low-resolution setting, which is why I had to come up with something new. The background for the new cover is a color-altered photo of a stone slab used as a bench behind the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts (which is fitting as they have a very nice Emily Dickinson display in that library).

Since I was re-making the cover for the book, I also wanted to fix something that had been bugging me. The book will be released as a full book (duh), or it can also be gotten as three separate stories, which make up the full book. I had designed covers for each of the individual stories and had added something fun to each…except for the first story, Tomb and Graves. For whatever reason, I never added anything to that cover. Yesterday I fixed that.

Behold! The new covers for the individual stories:

Once they’re ready to buy online, I’ll let you know!

Also, happy Sleeping In Day Mountain Day for those at Mount Holyoke College. If you climbed the mountain today, Emily was probably somewhere nearby, invisible (of course).

 

What I’m listening to: St. Vincent – Paris Is Burning