Tasha's Thinkings: The Joys of Cover Design Now We Have Sites Like Unsplash

Tuesday 26 November 2019

The Joys of Cover Design Now We Have Sites Like Unsplash

Making eBook covers used to be a lot harder than it is these days. Why I hear you ask?

Because there were a lot less resources available.

There have always been places like Getty images and some royalty free images sites, but the images on them cost not insignificant amounts of money, especially when combining several images to create new ones.

These days we have fantastic sites like:

where the most wonderful artists upload their work to be used totally for free. Technically we don't even have to give credit, but I think that's incredibly rude! For example, the image I am using in the background of my banner today is by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash.

Many of the photographers have donation options - a great way to pay back their hard work.

Now these images aren't always the highest quality and could be problematic for high def print work, but for web images like eBook covers, they are amazing.

Over the weekend I have been working on the covers for The Manor, the new series by Virginia Waytes, coming early next year to Wittegen Eros and the Sexy Stories podcast.

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Firstly, can I just say how sexist the photo industry tags seem to be! I typed in the word "sexy" and "erotic" on all 3 of the sites I mentioned above and all I got back were pictures of women. Now while I appreciate this because I needed some of those as well, I was looking for some sexy men too! To get suitable pictures of men the most productive search terms were "young man" "abs" and "muscles" and most of the images returned weren't close to what I was looking for.

Anyway, I did manage to eventually find all the images I was after.

You can check out the cover reveal for Episode 1 - Lamb in Wolf's Clothing over at Virginia's wordpress blog: Virginia Waytes - The Parlour - Sexy Stories. And yes, it's very different from the one that was on the Free Fiction Friday version of the book.

BTW - for those wondering, yes, Virginia is my alter ego - a new pen name to focus specifically on the podcast and paranormal erotic romance eBooks and get away with being a little bit naughty 😘. Virginia has a shiny new newsletter for everything to do with the podcast and accompanying books, and we will be running a giveaway when we launch for all members.

Join now to be in with a chance of winning a $20 (or equiv) Amazon voucher and all 12 novelettes of The Manor as they come out.