Pages

Friday, June 04, 2004

Publishing A Phoenix in Darkness

I was looking into ways to self-publish A Pheonix in Darkness. It's too long for a short story and too short for a novel, so I don't see any way to publish it the traditional ways. I could self-publish it as an e-book, but there are expenses involved. I can handle the formatting myself (I put everything I write in PDF anyway). It'd be nice to have a professional copy-editor, but it's expensive, and I think I can manage on my own. Most expensive is the cover art. It's not just aesthetically pleasing, it's important for drawing attention to the story in an online bookstore. It'd be nice to be able to get someone to do it.

Then I figured, I'm no artist, but why not? I can use Microsoft Publisher just as well as the next guy, and while I can't do much in the way of freehand drawing, I didn't get an engineering degree without learning some technical drawing skills. Start with one of Publisher's templates, completely change the color scheme, add an extensively remodeled symbol from Campaign Cartographer, and I might have something half-way decent. In any case here's what I came up with:



I think it turned out pretty well. While I'm not entirely certain of copyright issues, both Publisher and Campaign Cartographer are designed to make publishable documents, so I doubt there'd be a problem.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I moderate comments on posts more than a week old. Your comment will appear immediately on new posts, or as soon as I get a chance to review it for older posts.