You've Got This Tuesday: Using Opacity and Filters to Set the Mood of Your Book (Book Cover Desi

Happy Tuesday sweet friends and welcome to another edition of You've Got This Tuesday where I share wonderful on-writing and publishing tips, tools and tricks so you can take your Author-preneurship to the next level.

Today, we're talking Book Cover Design and a fabulous trick you can use to set the tone and mood of your book for prospective readers right on the cover. To do this, we'll be working with Filters and Opacity.

So, here we go...

If your book is a dark thriller, like the one I'm using as an example, you want a prospective reader to be able to "feel" that from just viewing your cover. You'd want to use dark colors - lots of black, midnight blues, dark grays, etc. And, of course, you want a punch of red for the danger, urgency and emotional fire/heat the book packs in between its pages.

But let's go another step deeper into great cover design...

It's not enough to simply choose a color, you want to play with filters and the opacity of the filters (meaning how blurry or cloudy or filmy) using the colors you select.

When I'm doing book cover design, I love to share side-by-sides with my clients so they can see and feel what each level of a filter and the opacity we're using does for the mood we're creating in the design.

Check this out...

Once we get lower than 80% opacity, it's starting to look more pink than red, right? And pink isn't scary. Lol! For scary, we want red!

At 89% though, it's still really dark, isn't it? Kind of tough to see everything else in the image. But what if we go somewhere between 89% and 80%?

Aha! I'm loving the 85% here! What do you think? The 89% is just a wee bit too dark...we can't see our ghost as well, right? But that 85% seems to do the trick. It sets the dark, ominous mood we want that comes with a book about Money. Murder. And the Mob. But it's not too dark that we have difficulty seeing our ghost and the chapel spire in the background.

You can see then from just this one piece of the book cover design process that there's so much detail you've got to be aware of and account for to make sure your book stands out to your target reader.

Designing covers is one of my favorite parts of the self-publishing process, and I have a bunch of great tips, tools and resources to share with you...so stay-tuned for more from my Book Cover Design 101 blog series...and, of course, my new Power-Up Publishing Program (PUPP) - releasing later this summer - will have a fantastic module on all-things cover design.

Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments below or hop on over to our Facebook Group and share them there...

Nothing Beat Writers Helping Writers Reach Readers, and I'm honored to light the path for you.

Cheers Hugs and Love —- DD