May 2015 Newsletter With Cover Letter: Fill & Download for Free

Because I have so many books I look to make either a series or an individual book unique in it’s look. Every book earning it’s own look. I have lots of color design/theory outlines I’ve mentioned before buying large coffee table books of magazine covers and design books. Goodwill, by local colleges, is a great place to scour for books. what I’m trying to see is how someone else is thinking about form, color, images.There are several categories:Non Fiction BooksNon-Fiction Educational BooksSpecial ReportsKyle Phoenix BriefsFictionFiction SeriesSpecial Report BundlesSpecial Reports, Briefs and Bundles came from reading several books about designing products that were brief in content—-10 to 200 printed pages, but geared more towards being eBooks. I initially published 4 books in March-May 2013. I had all of this related materials left over but they were tangents.By tangents I mean that I was teaching workshops that were focused on sex, sexuality, relationships, relationship dynamics, etc. On another hand I was also teaching teachers to teach better throughout schools and teaching university level courses—-so I had a lot of binders of lesson plans, information, outlines and responses back from students/classes.I isolated my work into those first 3 non fiction books on sex, sexuality and relationship dynamics. The 4th book was a collection of short stories I’d punished over the years,This was the absolute first cover.KDP/Amazon offered it as a template and I chose it because the tri-image I thought folded well into the 3 positionalities in the title. Red is my favorite color and the gold/brown worked nicely as a complement to the body.Then I did this one about a few months later because the body/jeans were a bit raggedy in the first iteration. I used a picture of 3 guys that the template staggered and that was nice. Ironically both of those covers sold a HUGE amount of copies, so I rotated them back and forth between paperback and eBooks then I added the little blurbs because I created palm cards to give out for workshops, etc. advertising the books on either side.It then matured to the first singular man edition over about a year.What happened fro 2013 to 2015 is I really started learning about visual branding.The second book Multiple Orgasm Training looked like this fro 2013.Then it matured to the below.The third book looked like this briefly then shifted to thegolden color.You can see I was tipping toeing around theme with the tri template. But the Gold cover for GM4M I really liked, it was simple, fit the color theory about energy, trustworthiness—-gold/blue with a nice stock picture of a couple. It sold very well.MOT with the center body pic sold well too.Then I experimented with branding and as you can see I was trying to do the half cover/picture/bold color.And that;s where the singular model on Pleasuring came from….MOT’s image was a hit right off the back. Conveyed strength, sexuality, slightly graphic but not profane so it could be sold in several bookstores as well as online.Good Men was a bit more difficult because it had to be LGBTSGL obvious but also convey happiness, speak to multiple ages, races, etc.. I decided to go interracial and skew a little young and I really liked the clean lines of the white and simple, affectionate image.Putting out updated and revised editions about every 2 years gives me time—-if you look at them as I have, across a table representing a span of time, you can see a maturity of design.I’d taught MS Office to Advanced certification for years and taken Illustrator,m Photoshop, Quark, Premiere and several web programs to certification myself,. What I found was that I didn’t have a designer’s eye years before publishing so I did very good intermediate graphic design alongside my other duties in corporate world—-pamphlets, reports, newsletters, resumes, etc.. So I had intermediate level experience by 2013 but I had never formally done art school.Luckily, I love learning and firmly and comfortably occupy—-”I don’t know.” so I’m willing to buy books, invest in classes, watch videos to understand what I don’t understand.Again eBooks give a little more freedom and even allow me to have two different covers.I like the current PTBV cover but I want to tweak it a bit.GM4M is about to debut a whole new paperback cover.MOT I think stands well on it’s original cover—-it sort of sums it up. But just for marketing purposes I have several other versions.This iteration of covers I wanted it to be more directly personal in visuals—-faces.Faces are a big part of certain kinds of book covers. Also I’ve changed the physical size of the books which gives me a different space to work upon. Originally they were all 6 x 9 but now I’ve expanded to 8.5 x 11. A lot of that had to do with filling the books with more images. The previous editions were dense with material and information but not as visually exciting as I’ve learned over the years to make nonfiction. I generally aim for an image every page or three for the MOT and PTBV books. Also more interior text boxes where I can nutshell information. The larger physical size gives me more room on the page as well. Plus I can include pages for notes by the reader or when I’m teaching from them in workshops, whatever I might say.Special Reports and Briefs I specifically made the covers sort of direct and in your face, closer to magazine covers of faces or bodies but they’re shorter materials.After years of selling them (digital sells way better than paperback about 65/35%)—-we worked out that instead of publishing and tracking 60+ reports and briefs and to simply the containment of ideas like Sex,Money, Relationships, etc—-we’d consolidate into Bundles, related topics.Thai came about from workshops on Life Stages, 4 Special Reports that covered 4 stages of a man’s lifetime being combined into one book. And then 4 different fetishes that are Special Reports being combined into a single book. (Ironically Fetishes was the very first workshop I taught that would become a book in 2003—-but not until 2016 or later, the other proceeding it.) Again, in doing the workshops, I get a lot of feedback about the books, the ideas, what to alter, improve, upgrade.Further ironically I found in marketing that I was selling well but not getting Amazon reviews. I was getting hails and likes and direct mentions of men having the book on Blogger, YouTube,in emails, Facebook pages (a whole other entanglement), selling on Amazon and eBay, but not reviewing well. So I asked a couple of people and found that reviewing on Amazon for Black and Latino men potentially would “out” them. If the covers were exclusively geared towards them, they might buy it but they wouldn’t review it. Which meant that mainly Out or not happy customers would review even as I see steady profits.Which meant that I had to redesign the books to be more racially diverse in future editions. It works, it sells but my works are unique in having to speak to a demographic that may not wholly want to be exposed. Marketing is a bitch on many levels.No More Book Templates from AmazonThen KDP stopped providing a myriad of templates, moved to KDP from Createspace and offers reasonably bland eBook worthy covers—-which I reserve for Special Reports and Briefs.What I now have to do for the actual books is design from scratch.In order for the books to go into stores they have to include the back ISBN, a back company logo. Two logos on the bottom spine and top spine. And title and author on the spine.What I do now is design and clean up in PowerPoint and Photoshop and others then save as PDFs, Jpegs, Gifs, etc. and combine into my own templates with all the legal stuff on a book cover full spread.Tranny morphed well. I loved the inter-sectional graphic cover which was the first edition then the eBook cover then KDP changed so I pulled it onto a very stern black cover but then pushed back into a strong cover with the same face but greatly expanded over the entire breadth of both sides.That’s about 3–4 years of “maturing”. Playing with space, colors, fonts, getting a Proof copy—-I’m actually really good at this now. lol I wanted to keep color repetition with the hair color and font color but I wanted to graduate it and play with the shadows some. Playing with the mystery, the hidden of a trans person. But I wanted it to also stay unabashed in your face, this identity, this personal because you’re reading essentially a journal. It had to be and stay a striking face shot. The lipstick, slightly enhanced i a nice color splash—-I try to maintain for some covers 3–4 colors only. The lips also create both a color extreme against the skin color but bold stand out against the other colors and yet still sits close in a complement.No Face Covers/Multiple Faces, Controlling Color and Text on CoversStay With Me has taken close to a year, with the eBook released and selling as we went back and forth on design from total concept to finally singular image to the shading/coloring of the image competing with the font itself to finally a consensus experiment as the final. For now.The two male image was the original choice and as you can see it went through 10+ iterations and printings of Proofs. The experiment of the cover with the text is to find the best font to relay that the book itself is servicing across a multiverse of possibilities. Again always experimentation.The problem is the image itself doesn’t enlarge well. It starts to bleed so it stays tighter and clearer smaller. Which means the text itself has to create speed, immediacy, intensity. However I’m not crazy about the font itself however with spacing it’s difficult to use other fonts because gain bleeding in color. So I’m going to compare with text and without text and decide in the next couple of weeks as I receive copies.There are at least another 10+ drafts in PowerPoint slides for all the other books. To really find something, to really find art you’re constantly fiddling, taking new pictures, incorporating things. I even took a baby picture of myself, blew it up then threw broken glass and glitter on it to capture an effect for a cover. I later found I could do it slightly better digitally.I had 2 other covers for Puzzle—-printed up a strong Proof with one cover but then I took a break and took another go around to try and capture the puzzle aspect of the title and the story itself and then really play with the letters. Really p[lay with how we cognitively recognize words even jumbled. That was fun.In other covers I try to avoid or start with a strong color background—-white, black, gold, red, blue and work from there. Have a color theme in mind.I liked the 1st Hush cover, it’s like the 7th iteration of choices. But I wanted a white book cover. The above eBook cover happened by accident with the staff image jangling the name in a fascinating way. Right now we’re working on repeating that for the paperback. There can be good accidents and experiments. How to keep the accident and perhaps draw the text in tighter on the title or there’s another version where the title keeps wrapping around the book itself that I might want to try and incorporate. Then there’s some real insanity of a tetrahedron and a burning building that plays in the book with yes, cover iterations including them—-I’ll try to find and post later. lolI’ve done some paintings and one in particular where I was trying to capture Picasso’s ability to draw a complex image in one stroke without taking the brush off of the surface. I wasn’t able to do that but I surprisingly created this beautiful erotic image that I want to professionally frame and find a book cover to put it on. It’s rough, simple, erotic, discernible yet clearly almost casual.I also bought the huge Klimt book with all of his works in it. Sometimes I sit and just flip through the pages, meditating on the patterns, the colors, the intensity. I do the same with Basquiat and Van Gogh, Manet,Monet, Caravaggio.Explore artists!!!!! And over time you’ll find a deft eye, a surer hand. My next journey is fully immersing myself into InDesign—-I have literally broken MS Office in all of the layout and design work I've forced it to do.What will be interesting is in 5 to 19 years using inDesign and Photoshop what the above covers will mature to….?#KylePhoenix#TheKylePhoenixShow