Okay, it's not really a cover reveal because both the book and the new cover are already up on my profile, but. White Crystal Butterflies  has needed a cover update for a while, and I really should be writing, so obviously I spent eight hours today down a cover-making rabbit hole instead. The result? 

And because nothing like this ever happens without a whole saga behind it, I am here with the story of how this cover came to be!

Why the cover change?

Back in early September, I was just minding my own business when an offer dropped out of the sky and landed in my lap like a pathologically snuggly cat in an uninsulated apartment on the coldest day of winter. (Unrelated, but I sometimes have to shut my little old orange boy in the bathroom just so I can get anything done. If my lap is blocked, he'll sit on my chest, stomach, arms, hands, keyboard, laptop screen... anyway, you get the idea). Overnight, my writing hobby became a whole lot more professional. As one does, I immediately eyed up my covers and took a very deep breath.

I have... a lot of books. That means a lot of covers. And I'd made many of them long enough ago and/or when I was still inexperienced enough that I couldn't remember how many of their photos were for-sure from sites where I could legally use them for free.

This spurred a sweeping (okay, panicked, I was in school and had a week to do it all) upgrade of all but a few covers on my profile. I was satisfied with most of them, even happier with a few, and sincerely pained about a couple. My then-new cover for White Crystal Butterflies fell into the latter category. Unfortunately, I was also going into my first semester of grad school, so all further procrastigraphics were put on hold indefinitely.

The cover in question:

Not bad, but not the best it could be, either!

Flash forward to just under a week ago. I was chatting with a friend on Discord when the topic of covers came up. She asked if I was open to advice on mine, and being the graphic-design nerd and magpie that I am, I said absolutely. Anything to improve the shinies that make me so happy on my books and profile. One of the covers she singled out as needing improvement was WCB's, and with a bit of spare time on hand and that advice fresh in my memory, I set about redoing the cover.

Why the butterfly?

So, this other author's first comment on the cover I'd been using was that it was far too busy. Her second was about the lack of focus on any single element. Because covers are seen at such small size on Wattpad, she told me to drill down one element/motif that best captured the book, and to put that on the cover as a focal point. That element also had to make it clear that this was speculative fiction—in other words, it needed to have a Sci-Fi vibe.

It wasn't hard to figure out what the motif was for WCB: it's literally the title. However, I soon realized that I'd be on my own when it came making the right version of that motif for the cover. Unlike the previous two iterations where I found a suitable picture and slapped text on it, there are not a lot of free photos of slightly menacing ice butterflies with Sci-Fi vibes out there. Who knew?

That is how I spent at least three of those eight hours finding, clipping, tinting, brightness/clarity adjusting, and otherwise detailing one picture of a butterfly   😂   It didn't capture the Sci-Fi element, but as it turned out, it didn't have to. That cover background is not, in fact, some concept art of an AI's neural system. It's ice. Because apparently ice likes to freeze in Sci-Fi patterns sometimes.

Nature and photo editing are wonderful things.

What else changed?

There was one other significant alteration that went into this cover—one that spilled out across the rest of my profile, too, as cover updates never seem to go smoothly when you have 21 books and your graphic-design skills are constantly improving. This was the size of my author's name.

So trivial?

It's not. This other author I was talking to (rightfully) goes around banging a drum at people for having their author's names sized too small on their covers. If readers can't read it properly at small size, it becomes a branding issue—the kind you really don't want as you start to gain some measure of name recognition. My name on WCB's cover was too small. Same goes for the rest of my covers. I knew this. I'd sized them up a little recently (bigger than the old-cover photo posted above) but it still wasn't big enough.

So I increased the size of WCB's author's name. This, though, revealed another problem: the font of the author's name didn't fit the genre. This would have been an eas(ier) fix if not for another piece of advice I already followed: there is strong branding value in having your author's name in the same font across all of your covers. It's far easier to recognize a name at a glance that way.

(That font is atrocious for many reasons, but you get the point).

The eventual solution we landed on was two different author's-name variants for my books: one for Fantasy and one for Sci-Fi.

Fantasy: A broad serif font (Noto Serif) because Fantasy loves its serifs.

Sci-Fi: A condensed sans serif font (Roboto Condensed) with a broader letter spacing to make up for the more crowded letters.

You can see the difference below!

Sizing, colour, and placement will differ between books, but that's a good side-by-side of the two fonts. More fun facts: author's-name sizing is determined by the width of the title. This keeps the cover from feeling top- or bottom-heavy with the addition of the name.

If you knew about the size issue, why didn't you fix it before?

See, there's this thing called imposter syndrome.

"But August," you say. "You're literally a professional writer. What do you mean, 'not as competent as others perceive you to be'?"

If only brains worked that way! The truth is, I've always struggled with imposter syndrome in some way or another, even as my writing has become less and less of a hobby, and more and more of a part-time job. In this case, my brain's target was profile size. I'm pretty small on Wattpad, all things considered. And some of my fellow pros have platforms tens if not hundreds of times the size of mine. Some have books with a thousand times more reads than my most successful novel. Even people who aren't their readers might see their books in a bookstore and recognize their name.

For those people, it makes sense to have a bigger author's name. They're more important, right? And nobody cares about the identity of a small fish in that very big pond.

Imposter syndrome is fun! (Not)

For me, this meant that even though I knew  my author's name should be bigger on my covers, I'd never pulled out all the stops and made it as big as it really should be. Which isn't even all that big. There are authors who have so much name recognition, they put their name where their title should be and vice versa. I am not one of those.

But nobody's going to take me seriously if I can't do the same for myself, so I did the thing. And it wasn't a change I could make on just one book, so of course I spent the next hour and a half copy-pasting and tweaking the author's names on every single book on my profile. Why do I have so many books? I could not tell you. Fml.

And thus the day's drama ended. I got no writing done. I got no homework done. I did no cooking or cleaning or other life things that are part and parcel of adulting. But I have a new cover and it makes my magpie brain happy? It's even shiny! So I'll count that as a win ✨