susan earlam ~ horror author

Its been a while.

Hi! How are you?

We finally unpacked the last box from our move, hurrah!

I thought I’d lift the veil a little on the book cover process I went through for Earthly Bodies. Before I enlisted a book cover designer.

Some of you may know I have a degree in Fine Art. I’m highly creative and have a DIY ethos. I couldn’t help myself, I had a go at designing the cover for Earthly Bodies in Canva. I rediscovered these drafts recently, so I thought I’d share.

These are from one year ago.

The thing is, these are okay/passable, maybe. Let me honest, there are covers out there that are much worse.

Which is part of the reason I wanted to share them.

Plenty of indie authors do this, the bottom line is that doing your own cover saves money.

But, for me, because I knew I’d created these, I couldn’t see them like a real book cover. They didn’t look professional enough to me. They didn’t look like they could sit beside a traditionally published book, which is what I wanted.

They also weren’t beautiful enough. I couldn’t reach that level of beauty alone, I needed help to level up, and to level up my book.

• Come and see my book cover design brief that I gave to my designer (including all the books I looked at for inspiration)
• Or skip ahead to find out what Marta, my designer, came up with.

Let me know what you think of these book cover options. Especially if you’ve read Earthly Bodies!