Professional courtesy among artists

As I'm looking at Faiz's almost-final proof for the cover of Disciple, Part IV, I'm thinking about cover art again. (Previous post for Indie Life.)

Past experience
I was involved in the tabletop gaming (RPGs, you've probably heard of D&D) industry for a while in the early 90s. That was my first experience in working with artists, and it taught me the most valuable characteristics of a good artist:

• gets the art in by the deadline
• if not that, contacts you as soon as s/he knows it will be late
• sends the art at the size/format you asked for
• did what you asked, within the boundaries of artistic interpretation

Several times, production was held up by late artwork. More than once, I had to go to press with something that was obviously terrible because it was so late. Artists disappeared off the face of the earth. Needless to say, I was not working with professionals and generally, it was a headache.

Then again, I wasn't paying for professionals, so no surprise that I didn't get them.

How much will a cover run?
Your cover art is extremely important. I cannot emphasize that enough. It will be judged at a glance and steer readers toward, or away from, your work. You will use it in all of your promotional materials. It will be sitting on Amazon's virtual shelves for years. This is the flash that your story delivers the substance behind. Make it good.

Cover art should not be cheap. You get what you pay for. Yes, you can get a stock-made cover from various graphic artists for a low price... do you really want to share a cover with other books? Haven't you put enough work into your story that it deserves its own identity?

And an artist deserves to be compensated fairly. Like writers, they tend to fight their way to the bottom of the price barrel and have trouble asking for the pay they deserve. Personally, I don't want to contribute to that.

I've been finding my cover artists at DeviantArt.com. The amount of talent over there is astounding. I can tell you from experience that posting a job offer in DeviantArt's forums with a $500 price tag on it will bring out the near-professional-level artists. And the aspiring less-talented ones too, but a sifting through a few dozen portfolios will hone your eye toward the signs of quality and whose style fits the style of your book best.

Are you kidding?
$500 is a lot. Too much? Well, would you sell your manuscript and all its rights for $500? That's what you're asking the artist to do -- this is a work for hire and you're buying all the rights to it. (The artist should retain the right to use this work in his portfolio, though.) You're asking for a few dozen hours of work that are backed up by years of practice to master artistic tools and find a personal style.

One law applies equally to writers and artists: in order to validly break the rules, you must first show mastery of the rules. Writers are often shot down for incorrectly mis-using grammar, non-linear story structure, and the like -- though this is open to interpretation and personal taste of course. Likewise, artists can bend the "rules" of visual presentation if they do it well. Like writing, it takes significant time and work to master visual art.

Also like writing, it's tough to earn a living at visual art. When was the last time you paid money to simply look at a painting? (was the artist still alive?)

Professional courtesy
Cheap book covers don't sit easy with me. I know how much sweat, blood, and tears get invested into a story. I know how much a freelance editor costs. Don't skimp on the cover, and don't be a cheapskate. We're all artists trying to get paid for something we love, here.

Sigil vs. hand-coding ebooks

Sigil is a free piece of software for building EPUBs. I heard lots of raving about it at Balticon, so I decided to give it a try for generating Disciple, Part III's ebooks. Previously, I had been agglomerating all of my text into one document, stripping it down to a naked .txt file, hand-coding it using jEdit, and converting the resulting HTML file into EPUB and MOBI with Calibre. (My PDFs are generated from the print layout because Calibre sucks at making PDFs.) I talked about that process a bit in this post.

Things I liked 

• Sigil let me import separate text files into the EPUB. Thumbs up on that one.
• Sigil automatically generates a TOC for you. If you use their header tags, that is -- it won't let you choose custom tags. A minor problem, okay, I can make that work.
• Sigil automatically replaced all the em dashes with the appropriate code. Nice. But it didn't catch the odd characters, í & ü & ä, so I had to search & replace those. Good thing that writing this made me think to check the ellipses, because it didn't do them either. On the whole, not much improvement over doing that by hand.

Yeah, these are the good points and I'm already complaining. To be fair, if you aren't familiar with HTML markup, Sigil does have a nice, word-processor-like interface to help you with that. Being me, I went straight to looking at the code and didn't use the word-processor side much. It was convenient when I got the revisions back from my proofreader and had to make some minor edits.

Things that were annoying

• I'm running Mac OS 10.7.5. Sigil's current version is for 10.8, isn't backwards compatible, and there isn't a user's manual specifically for the 10.7 version. So the manual I used occasionally referred to functions that didn't exist in what I was using. Feel the love.
• Their vaunted Regex search function crashed Sigil a few times, then mysteriously began working. Regex is a method for searching and replacing HTML tags and other bits of code that are surrounding text that you don't want to change. Why do you need need a whole search function for that? Because…
• Importing files into Sigil generates a lot of junk tags which are redundant once I apply my Disciple-specific CSS.  This offends my aesthetic sensibilities. It's annoying to have to do several searches to clean them out, too.
• Having done all the necessary cleaning and coding, I opened the resulting EPUB in Nook and... the cover art did not show up in the bookshelf view. None of the spacing I specified in the CSS had been applied. Grumble, snarl, wtf.

Calibre to the rescue, as usual. I converted the EPUB to an EPUB and lo and behold, it's fixed. Also generated the MOBI (for Kindles) using Calibre, but that was to be expected.

On the whole, color me not so impressed with Sigil. Then again, I'm a bit of a control freak (as you know if you're a regular reader) so take that with however much salt you like. :)

Creating eBooks

When I decided to publish myself, I knew I'd need an editor and a cover artist -- and I planned to do all the graphics myself. I put the money I'd spend on that into paying for a better editor and artist. I'd never created an ebook before, but how hard could it be...?

Attempt #1: InDesign CS5
I've been making a living as a graphic designer for something like 15 years now -- print-oriented, got into it by way of proofreading, and I've been a one-woman prepress department. Naturally, in generating the layout for the print version of Disciple, Part I, I took it to InDesign and threw it down. No fuss, no muss.

Online, I went looking for how to export InDesign files to EPUB (the format used by non-Kindle readers.) I quickly found that while Adobe did put together a pile of helpful PDFs and web pages at some point, very few of them are still available and you tend to get dumped onto the "You need to buy CS6!" page.

After six hours of tweaking options and slogging through the results, I had an EPUB that made my Nook reader sprain its brain every time it tried to open the file. I might have been able to fix the files, but my butt-cheeks were beginning to ache.

Attempt #2: HTML from scratch
I kept Guido Henkel's excellent guide to creating an EPUB from scratch open and used jEdit (which was probably overkill) to create an HTML file with a simple, embedded CSS.

Calibre kindly added all the metadata and the cover art, then output it as an EPUB that looks lovely in my Nook reader. Next up: MOBI conversion, which Calibre will do too.

Clear winner: build it from scratch.
Photo by Pablo Medina,
free at sxc.hu

Total time invested: 3 hours, and all it needs is the final cover art. Seriously. I'm the kind of person who never pays for free software, and I'm going to send Calibre $20.

If you're comfortable with basic HTML coding -- I didn't use anything more complicated than style and span commands -- you can do this. Guido's guide includes a sample CSS that you can copy/paste and then tweak to your liking. Calibre does all the heavy lifting. The whole thing was quite painless.

Needless to say, I'm rather disappointed in InDesign. But I'm over another hurdle and closer to publishing Disciple.