I’m a very visual person and appreciate good art.
Famous artists feature in my ancestry and many of my immediate family paint and draw well. I don’t!
While I have some skill at technical drawing anything requiring a free hand and colour is beyond me. I can compose a visually attractive photo—but it has to stand on its own as, to my eternal chagrin, I’ve never mastered the art of Photoshop, Gimp or any other image manipulating software.
Anyone who follows me on social media knows that I have a particular eye for imagery. I know what works and what doesn’t and have ruffled feathers in the past when it came to the cover designs for a series of anthologies I was involved with.
With all that in mind, today I went ahead and tried to make a cover for my upcoming novel ‘Gods of Fire’. This was a bad, terrible, not at all good idea, because:

• I have a VERY clear idea of what I want the cover to look like
• I don’t have any images that are remotely close to what I want, nor can I find any
• I thought I could learn Canva in a morning
• I can’t even find a font I like

All I’ve managed to achieve is to make myself frustrated and grumpy.
This is clearly an aspect of self-publishing that I need to leave to the professionals, just like I did with the editing (shout out to Bowlerfern in that department). So, I’m now waiting for a few book cover artist/designers to get back to me.
Back to writing for me.

For over a year I’ve been sending the manuscript of my first complete novel, “Gods of Fire”, out to agents seeking representation. To say that it has not been a success is a wild understatement. Yet, I remain convinced I’ve written a good story that will appeal to readers who love both fantasy and erotica.

So, I’ve launched myself into the unknown, but thankfully well-charted, waters of the self-publication process.

A complete novice, my first step was to send out a call to my writerly colleagues on Facebook and Twitter. This resulted in a mixed bag of responses, most of them encouraging and many with some great advice on how to get started. I also spent at least a day poking around the internet, looking for resources and recommendations for success.

The two main pieces of advice that have popped up over and over again are:

1. Get a professional editor to work on your manuscript;
2. Your cover is critical, and again professional help is highly recommended.

I patted myself on the back for already having ticked off number one, and I’m chasing up a cover artist to help me with number two.

My next challenge was to convert my Word document into the right format for a book. Again, two main recommendations emerged, Vellum and Draft2Digital. Vellum is for Mac users, which I am not, so the decision was easy. It took me a day of trial and error, formatting my manuscript and testing the different options in Draft2Digital to get a look I’m happy with.

Within the space of just a couple of days, I’d gone from terrified and completely ignorant, to sufficiently confident in my ability to create a product and get it into the market. But of course, that’s just the beginning of the process.

So watch this space!