The Making of Taking Back Forever

I did a post like this once before. It was fun, so I'm doing it again.

As with the GRASPING AT ETERNITY cover, Karen took the photograph that is on the cover of TAKING BACK FOREVER. That's one of the cool things about self-publishing: you have complete control over your cover.

So, we actually did TWO photoshoots, and the first one was a disaster. The original concept for the cover involved just boots--no legs or anything--but we quickly realized that it didn't work, and that the boots looked more like amputated feet coming out of the top of the picture. I was wearing the wrong color jeans to get my legs in the photo, and it started to rain. Wind blew those little petals all over the place, and we had to wrap everything in a sheet and put it on Karen's back porch.

The photos didn't turn out well, to say the least.

The second photoshoot went much better, and we had multiple pictures we liked. The winner was this one:

This one was fun in photoshop because I had to tilt the picture so that the cage with the heart were straight, and I had to clone the background, and duplicate a feather (haha, I think feather duplicating is becoming a pattern) among a lot of other things (describing photoshop processes is not very interesting.) One of the last steps in making this cover was something we didn't do for the last one. The light overlay of purple clouds to turn up the paranormal feel.

I actually superimposed the GRASPING AT ETERNITY cover over top of TAKING BACK FOREVER to make sure the text matched up as much as it could, and you'll see elements of the first cover in this second one if you compare them side by side. ;)

This cover needed a lot less editing, because we'd already worked out many of the kinks making the GRASPING AT ETERNITY cover. I'd already figured out the text and the infinity symbol and where the swirls should go.

Okay, that's my story. Don't forget to enter the giveaway! (Just scroll down to my last post to find the rafflecopter!)