Welcome! This is Part 4 of the series on how The Other Side got published. Check out Parts 1, 2 and 3 if you hadn’t read them already.

So jumping in. The biggest thing to design…was the Book Cover!

BOOK COVER

So the book cover. I did research on how to make a book cover for The Other Side. A lot of it. Very quickly I realized that making my own book cover was out of the question. Even though we say “don’t judge a book by its cover” we say that because we do in fact judge books by their cover. If a book has a ratty cover, people won’t buy it, period. So knowing that, and seeing examples of truly atrocious self-published author-made book covers, I started to look into who can make my book cover for a reasonable price.

I avoided sites that were asking for well over $800 or $900 dollars, and really kept my eyes peeled out for scams. I did reach out to one freelancer about making my book cover but he turned me down because of not working in the genre of book I described. Then I found an author blog site about different sites for book covers, and I picked Design Crowd.

Once more however, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have anyone telling me how to use Design Crowd. So I did end up spending money on the site that I wouldn’t have had to spend if I knew how to navigate the site. For instance, I did a project where I invited different designers to compete over my book cover, and that cost money to offer separate amounts of money to each designer to take part.

I did pick one out of the bunch. But as you see, I did get my money’s worth and I love The Other Side’s book cover design.

Part of getting the book cover was to send in my author photo and author bio to the designer. My mother and sister helped me write my bio because talking/writing about myself for other people is the hardest thing to do. Like asking me “Tell me about yourself” is the worst.

A. E. COSTELLO BLOG

This one is about who you know honestly. I went to my high school’s graduation 10 Year anniversary, and out of a graduating class of like 300 only 7 of us showed up. One of those people is a friend I had, and I was telling her about my book and my author site that I was having trouble with since I didn’t really know how to use it and I thought it didn’t look professional. I showed it to her, and she said she could help me. We ended up making a meeting date, and through her I got connected to Heizwerthy and got my blog completely redesigned. So the site you’re on now is new and improved, and I honestly can’t even remember what the old one looked like.

So everything you see is made at Heizwerthy and I’m very happy with it. It also cost money but they were very reasonable and gave me a lot of discounts which made it affordable.

LINKING UP

Part of this design process was also learning how to set up my Facebook author page A. E. Costello Author Page which I had no idea at all how to do.

Research.

Everything that came into designing book covers and the websites was by researching and finding out online how to do it. I only recently figured out how to link this blog to my Twitter and Facebook account so it updates my blog posts automatically. I used to by hand copy the link into Tweets and Facebook posts. I also still don’t know how to use my Twitter, so that’s something I still look up on how-to sites.

BOOKMARKS

I did not design a single bookmark.

My mother did. My mother who works full time and is a single mother, and has continued to provide for me, designed the bookmarks on her own time with her own contacts (and kept it as a surprise for me so I didn’t even know) and laminated and cut them herself. I was able to hand them out to my classmates during my final year at UWG in an effort to promote my work.

Marketing and promotion is an entirely different topic but I still haven’t scrapped the tip of the iceberg with it, I still don’t know exactly how that works, so that is certainly one topic I can’t expound on.

I don’t mind telling you readers that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a beginner, a newbie, still fresh from the starting gate. We’re on this journey together, after all. I published my first novel two years ago, and am currently working on my second. There’s plenty about being a professional author that I’m still in the dark about. But I’m learning as I go, step by step, bit by bit.

And I’m writing word by word.

That’s it for this post. The fifth and final installment of this series is PUBLICATION, which is where I’ll talk about exactly how I published The Other Side on Amazon.

And as always, while I write my cat Aomine keeps me company by my side.