Porting a Lulu book cover to Createspace.

A video tutorial about how I moved the Rise and Walk book cover from Lulu to CreateSpace. I will have more videos soon.

My first press release.

Greetings friends,

I apologize for my lack of posts lately. I attended the SiliCon Science fiction and Horror convention last weekend and was very busy preparing for the event. I will be posting information on how I made my promotional materials as well as how the convention went in successive posts. One of the first things that I had to do was create a press release about Rise and Walk. One author in the forums was a little surprised that I had yet to make a press release given all the success that Rise and Walk has received. I just didn’t know what to say until very recently. I researched other press releases for books and set to making my own.

I will have more updates soon but for now, here is my release.

Take Care,

Greg

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Independent Author Gregory Solis Rises to the Top in Print-On-Demand Horror with his Debut Zombie Novel, Rise and Walk.

Concord, CA, October 2, 2007 – Gregory Solis’ debut horror novel, Rise and Walk has risen to become the best selling horror title at Raleigh, North Carolina publisher Lulu.com, the fastest growing provider of print-on-demand books. Published in January of 2007, Rise and Walk assumed the top position in the horror category in September. Demand for the Zombie themed novel has steadily grown since its first appearance on Amazon.com on January 31^st of this year. In the past eight months Gregory Solis has gained book sales in the United States, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Gregory Solis will be appearing as a featured guest at the SiliCon Science Fiction and Horror Convention, October 5^th through the 7^th in San Jose California. He will be signing autographs as well as judging a short film competition and joining a panel discussion on horror writing.

Rise and Walk is a novel of survival horror in a world over run by a plague of the living dead. Two brave young women join forces with two thrill seekers in a terror filled struggle against the undead. Low on ammunition and supplies, the survivors use anything at hand to fight off the flesh hungry horde. As the party makes their escape they soon realize that there is nowhere to run when the dead Rise and Walk. It is the first book in a new horror adventure series that will examine the struggle of everyday individuals to find safety in a world that is falling apart. Rise and Walk has received many favorable reviews from the internet horror community.

Link to Publication: http://www.hadrianpublishing.com/

Title: Rise and Walk

ISBN: 978-1-4303-0600-9

Price $16.99 US

Link to SiliCon Convention: http://www.siliconventions.com/silicon/

ABOUT AUTHOR

Gregory Solis was born in San Francisco California. Educated at San Francisco State University where he earned a Bachelors Degree in Cinema. A lifelong writer of fiction he turned his talents towards Horror Fiction in 2006 when he began Rise and Walk. Published in 2007, Rise and Walk has received many great reviews. Greg is working on a sequel and further tales of zombie horror for his Rise and Walk series. He currently lives in Northern California where he writes and runs his own video editing business.

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MEDIA CONTACT: Gregory Solis, Riseandwalk@Gmail.com,

Designing the book cover of Rise and Walk

Since some people have commented on the design of Rise and Walk's cover, I thought I would spend some time discussing how it came about.
Rise and Walk is the first book in a series and I wanted to incorporate an element of branding in the title font and cover design. I needed to create some unifying graphical theme that could carry over through the subsequent books. I had some ideas but would have to wait until I had the main image for the cover.
The main image would have to relate to the title. Rise and Walk. I would have to show something dead rising. It should be bloody but not so gory that it would be unfit for a bookstore's shelf. I didn't want to do a full zombie because I would have to make it really nasty and I wanted the image to be more subtle. A bloody arm should do! So I grabbed my sweet girlfriend and her Nikon D70 camera, some Karo Syrup, red food coloring, petroleum jelly, a rough large pore sponge, some instant coffee grounds, and headed out to the woods behind my house.

The Make Up.
After finding a location with a tree that I liked I started to apply the make up. To add filth and age to my arm, I rubbed some instant coffee in patches on my skin. I made sure to rub some grounds over and under my fingernails as well. You cannot have a creature with clean fingernails. I pre mixed a bottle of clear Karo pancake syrup with red food coloring. If I were using this blood mix on a movie set, I would have thinned it with some water and added a little yellow coloring. For digital photography, I knew I could control the color and I needed the mixture to be thick so adding water was unnecessary. I also added some red food coloring to a small amount of Vaseline to create a quick sort of Thick Blood. I used the large pore sponge to drag some of the colored Vaseline across my arm to add texture. I then applied some of the syrup blood and let it drip down and around my arm. I dabbed at this sticky mixture with some more blood on the sponge and let it run naturally.




We shot many different photographs with my arm around the tree. The camera was set at a resolution of about 2000 by 3000 and each image was about a meg and a half in size. Once I got home and cleaned all the crap off of my arm and sat down to pick a photograph. This is the one I liked best.








I needed to sweeten it up a bit because the blood was lacking so I used the clone function in Adobe Photoshop to spread out some of the red. I sampled the darker areas of red and cloned them into the areas that needed more blood. Once that was done I made a levels adjustment to the entire image. Levels is just a way to adjust the tonal values of the image. Sometimes there is not enough color information in an image across the entire dynamic range, so adjusting the Red, Green, and Blue, levels independently can help to bring out detail. You simply move the sliders in to where there is color information for each RGB channel on the histogram.



Check out this site for more information on level adjusments in Photoshop.










Here is the adjusted image.















Next I desaturated the image to give it a little age and moved it over a bit to add the unifying graphical elements. I had to clone some of the tree over just a bit to fill in some areas that would be underneath a gradient that I wanted to add.





The unifying elements I came up with was a gradient frame on the left side and bottom that started out in full black and gently faded off the image. The sequels can share this framing with a different image and title to identify them as Rise and Walk books. By keeping the visual themes consistent, I am setting up a brand that the readers will hopefully recognize.




Now it is time for the title. I think that the title font and how it is presented is very important to creating a recognizable identity for the books. I looked at a lot of different books in my research and decided that I lacked the skills in illustration to draw an original title from scratch. But I knew I could build one digitally by manipulating a simple font. I began with a font called Kozuka Mincho.






I pulled down the opacity of the font to let some of the background show through. Pulling down the opacity makes the font as transparent as you like. A simpler way to describe it is that I faded the font by 30 percent.


Next, I beveled the text layer to roll off the hard corners and smooth out the lines of the font. Beveling can help achieve more of a 3d effect.





I added a gradient overlay to give a lighting effect to the title. Essentially this just makes the brightness of the text go from darker to lighter in which ever direction you choose. This can also add to a 3d effect.




Next, I added a drop shadow to give the text more depth. The effect is subtle but if you look at the e, it appears to have more punch with the drop shadow.




I used a Gill Sans font for the byline and used the same effects from before except for the opacity. I added no transparency to the byline because the background underneath it was very dark. Notice how the gradient overlay gives the name depth as if it were lit by a couple of lights. At this point I was happy with the name. The title would still need more work.







In Photoshop you can apply any image as a texture to a text layer. I wanted
something organic to add texture to the font. I chose an image of trees and applied the Bevel effect to the image. This had the effect of thickening the lines of the image.




See how the image now has some relief to it, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. The process is a little complicated, but what I did was use this altered image as a texture for the font. Even though the image is part of the Photoshop project file, you never see it in the final product. The ups and downs in the color information is applied to the face of the text, giving it a crinkly organic texture.

Now the text looks like it is some sort of organically peeling stone. I want to pursue this further and push this into a brighter silver color.
I also want to enhance the overall image.








Something more like this. By jacking up the brightness and increasing the contrast I was able to give more depth to the texture. I was very happy at this point.

















Here is how the overall adjustment worked out. If you are a Photoshop cat, the adjustment I made was +23 for brightness and +40 for contrast. The red became a sort of dirty old blood that suggests a heavily damaged creature. I really liked the contrast with the texture of the tree bark and the out of focus background.





That is how it came about. I did try many other variations and different designs before I arrived at this cover. If you are interested, some of those examples are here.
I hope that this was informative to you. Thank you very much for having a look.
Gregory Solis