ABOUT
Hi there, I'm so happy you stopped by. My name is Jacklyn, an author who started designing book covers as an artistic release between writing sprints and RWA discussion posts. I am not only traditionally published, but also self-published, and know firsthand how expensive purchasing a cover can be! Add marketing, formatting, and editing, costs to the mix, and too often authors have to sacrifice the quality of their cover art to make sure the interior of the book is the best it can be. My mission here is to avoid such a tragedy! Every great book deserves an equally great cover! Before picking up digital design, I was exclusively a medium artist, specifically with oil on canvas, sketching, and charcoals. As of 2022 I have 5 years of cover design experience and have designed for USA Today and Amazon best-selling authors. My covers have also been awarded multiple Rone Awards as well as covers of the month for different literary sites including InDetale. After selling covers on a couple of different, strictly vetted vendor sites, I decided to run my own business because I didn’t like some of the rules and stipulations such as restrictions on fonts. Typography can make or break a cover, being restricted to using a select few fonts can restrict the final effect of a cover. I'm not saying that working as an artist with these companies was a bad experience, it wasn't, as a result, I am well-versed in image copyright, licensing, bleed zones, trim zones, and the different sizes and resolutions used for websites verses cover uploads in both ebook covers and print wraps. Not everyone publishes through KDP and sometimes publishers and authors alike want something slightly outside of common industry standards for cover dimensions. If you are an independent author you have the right to choose which industry standard you want to have your cover produced in (because there is more than just one), but keep in mind that it does have to match the expected dimensions of your book in its final stage. In most cases resizing your art to be the perfect fit is a necessary and easy adjustment. That being said I do think that it is important to mention if you are going through a traditional publisher things happen a little bit differently. First, before you contact me about a cover, please check with your publisher to ensure they welcome outside sourcing for your cover art. Many times publishers will have a team that handles this aspect of publishing for you. In many cases, authors are very limited in the decisions of what their cover art will be. If they are going through a larger publishing house in many cases they have little to no say at all. Larger publishing houses generally have a tried and true theory as to what kind of cover will sell your specific genre of book, Unfortunately sometimes their views and yours will not line up. The best advice I can give is to say that 99% of the time your publisher knows what they are talking about. After all, this is not their first rodeo.