Backyard Deer Hunting

For any author who has worked on a book manuscript for months, it is a significant event to finally see his thoughts realized in the proof for the book cover. With conventional publishers, the cover design is often not even run by the author with the result that sometimes embarrassing things happen like the author’s name is misspelled or some vital fact about his life is wrongly stated in his biographical information.

Having been on both sides of the picture from designing and publishing many of my own books to depending on trade publishers to do it, my present dealings with AuthorHouse have been a welcome combination of the two. I came up with the rough design of the cover materials (both front and back) and the spine printing, and they came up with the background colors, type fonts, arrangement of the printed materials on the pages and positioning of the prominent photos on the cover.

My cover is distinctive in that it uses two photos. The top photo is a nice adult doe standing in a backyard setting. The bottom photo on the page is a table set with a number of cooked deer products from the recipes in my book. Prominent arrows connect the two photos reinforcing the “Converting deer to dinner for pennies per pound” theme of the book.

The dishes are nothing fancy, but in fact were the least expensive that I could purchase at my local Walmart Superstore. The overall result is to give the impression that hunting and cooking local deer is an activity that anyone can do, and not an activity that can only be done by the financially affluent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 7:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.