So, you are drawing a cover image for one of our White Water Writers books. Let’s give you all the information we can. You can see previous covers here.
- You are going to be put in contact with an individual camp leader. They’ll to be on the ground with the writers from Monday to Friday and will press the final publication button. They’ll send you a selection of character ideas on Monday and then you are good to interpret them as you see fit.
- One of the things we frequently ask writers is ‘who would you case to play this character in the movie?’, and I suspect that would be useful to you, although it is obviously not expected that the illustration looks like the actor (otherwise you’d be drawing Emma Watson on a ridiculously regular basis).
- The camp leader would probably like in-progress photos, if only to show writers when they lose motivation. We need the final image by 2pm on Friday because that’s when we press publish.
- I’m hyper aware that artists should be paid fairly, and I want to be very clear that I’m NOT looking for “Produce me a high quality professional cover for this low fee” I’m looking for “Give us a sketch that we can use in our cover for this book that these kids made for this set fee”. It’s very much “£50 worth of your art” rather than “Do lots of art for £50”.
- Analog/digital. We prefer digital drawings to scanned in ones, and scanned and then digitally coloured is a nice middle ground.
- If (and it very much isn’t complusoury) you are going to do a background it’s ideal if we get that as a seperate layer because it makes it a lot easier to fit the title in and so on.
- Work-in-progress shots are very nice for social media, so feel free to throw them up on your channels, tag us (White Water Writers or me personally) and we’ll boost. Also please let us know if you are okay with draft images you send us being used on social media.
- Feedback is good, we like feedback – the more good feedback we get on the process the more that we can make it nice for everybody 🙂
- Invoice! You’ll have to invoice us for the £50 because that’s how the charity’s payments work. If you haven’t done an invoice before – here’s a sample one. Feel free to send one in advance, it gets actioned when we get the cover.
- Amazon Cover template generator – you aren’t being paid for a full cover, you are being paid for an image someone else will put on a cover. But some artists like doing the whole cover anyway (for portfolios, or because they don’t like how Joe ‘fixes’ their art 🤣). If you fancy putting it into a cover template, this is the one to use. The camp leader will tell you roughly how many pages there are.
- The main thing to remember is keep details (fingers, hair, ect) away from the edge of frame (it’s the organge border on the template).
- The back of the book should have the same background as the front of the book (the spine can be an absolute pain)
- Please save the image at a least 350dpi – if you save it at 300, then amazon claims it is 298 and refuses the image.
- Let us know how you want to be credited in the book! We normally end up putting an instagram tag in…
Below are some examples of covers we like and the sketches we got halfway thought…
