Worth Words?

For anyone who doesn’t know, I do book cover designs, in addition to writing books. However, my design page currently sucketh the big one, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that my cover designs are pathetic. They’re better than what I’ve seen on a lot of self-published books. That’s not saying much.

Enter a cover critique group, and yeah. Big honkin’ difference. This is the rehashed cover for my almost-latest almost-greatest:

Click on the image to see it embiggened.

The genre is romance-suspense-adventure-psi, if there is such a thing. (A friend dared me to write romance. I don’t do romance, but I’m a sucker for that kind of dare, ergo it went from romance to romance-suspense-adventure-psi. Nyah.) I went through a lot of covers that were okay for romance – not spectacular, but okay. I found a few which were good enough for suspense. I found one I LOVED that yelled “ADVENTURE!” and came thisclose to using it. I didn’t find any really that touched on the paranormal/psi element.

Then I found this cover and voila! It works for all my genres. What’s more, while you can’t see the back cover, it’s the same rainy/misty type look, with a hand reaching from the mist to grab you. Or to grab the back cover text, depending on your point of view.

Ahem. The point of this post wasn’t to talk about cover making, exactly. I bought a used camera today, for several reasons.

1. I’m trying to get away from stock images for my book covers and needed the means to take professional-quality shots.
2. We’re building our own stock portfolio, having bought a domain with the intent of selling images nobody else offers.
3. I have a shit-ton of really wonderful props I want to use for photography, but it ain’t happening with my phone camera.
4. I need a good camera I can use with a tripod, to offset the shaky hands. Your average point-and-shoot might technically screw onto our pro tripods, but it would be a joke to use them that way.
5. We bought this specific one because it uses the same lenses as my husband’s camera uses, so we can share. I bought a Nikon D3200, 24.1 megapixels.

I think it’s the same kind Dangerspouse bought a while back, except I know paid more for mine. To be fair, I bought mine from a retailer with a warranty, and the one I bought has under 700 actuations (shutter clicks), which for this type of camera is stupendously low. I also paid a little extra for a two-year repair/replace policy. I’ve looked at some used DSLR cameras where the count was over 100,000 actuations. When G and I go on a photo run, we both average 150-200 shots per day or more. Another friend in Europe says her average per photo shoot ranges upward of 300 at a time. So 700 actuations is virtually new. I’d been tap-dancing around this camera for a while and finally pulled the trigger this morning. Hopefully it’ll arrive this week and next weekend I’ll be annoying my grandson by taking pictures of him the whole time he’s here, bwahaha!

For the record, we already own a set of studio lights, several tripods, a lightbox, and other photo equipment. My husband’s on the high end of amateur in terms of photography. He used to photograph items for catalogs, so while he wasn’t a “professional photographer” in the sense of making his entire living from photography, he was definitely not some punk kid with a camera and an attitude, either. He knows his way around lenses and F-stops. Me, I gotta learn. I’ll be using tripods and lighting and all the futzy stuff hubby wanted but never uses.

Hubby’s great at the spontaneous shots, but I’ll be shooting our still life pictures and other staged photos for the website. I need to get rich enough to hire some models and do some “people” shots, but for the time being the people will be limited to family members and anyone I can blackmail into signing a release for free.