One of my dreams is to do book covers and internals for burgeoning chapter book readers and to help it take flight I’m going to show what I can do. Da Da DAaaaaaaa!
Firstly I’ve created myself a little dummy logo for some dummy book publishing, introducing Platypus Books!
This is going to be used in my dummy book covers as a place holder, so that publishers can see it all laid out before them and they’ll have no option but to commission me to work with them on their next series *fingers crossed*
Then I made up an author name, I have a few, pulling from family names and the like. I settled on L.M. Hoskin, a good robust name that is gender neutral and may be used in other formats for a couple of other projects I have bouncing around in my rather roomy noggin.
For the cover, I took an image which got really great feedback when I posted it on Instagram. I set about finessing it in Procreate so that it could be laid out correctly, making room for the title etc.
I’m also not a writer so I sourced some dummy text using the old faithful Lorem ipsum. This site, https://www.lipsum.com will give you any number of paragraphs for your own adventure if you’re interested. This place holder text allows me to show how a finished page might look with the text in place.
Again, using Procreate, I set about drawing some images to represent other aspects of the imagined story to show I can do consistent characters, provide motifs, some fancy border action and incidental characters.
From these I finished up three images in a greyscale format.
Working in InDesign I fiddled about. I’m not a graphic designer, but have had cause to use the program before and was willing to have a bash at it.
I used two fonts: MVB Grenadine for the body text and Providence Sans Pro for the titles and page numbers.
Creating shapes I allowed the text to flow around the more organic edges of some, but not all, of the images. The result is below, and I think I’ve knocked it up into something really good (I also had a person give an opinion or two, and they liked it (once I made the changes they suggested)).
So, if you are a publisher of early chapter books or middle-grade fiction, I’m contactable here.
If you’re not a publisher BUT you know someone WHO IS a publisher of early chapter books or middle-grade fiction, send them this page.
And, if you like what I’ve done, let me know on Instagram or Twitter, give us a follow or just send out some positive vibes.
I’d love to do some of these in real time, but until then, Platypus Books might just dummy up some more!
