CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Step 2: Create the Cover Image Before you begin with your cover, take a look at any of your other covers. You are going to want to have a feel for the styles you’ve used for a particular series, or type of book. That style is called ‘branding’. It helps readers identify your books on the platforms they visit. There is probably a whole series of blog posts you can do on branding. For now, I will assume you know the general feel you want your books to have, and just say it is important to retain a similar feel for your books. As you probably guessed from the Comment section in the Advanced Options part of creating the image, I’ll be using the cover for the third volume of the 2014 Short Works collection. The first step I take as part of creating a cover mage is to colour the background back. This means you need to understand layers. Each image is made up of layers. Some layers are as big as the image, but some aren’t. The first layer is the layer you can see when you fi...

So, today, I downloaded the newest version of GIMP—figured I couldn’t do a useful how-to for folk new to the program without having the version they were most likely to have downloaded. So, with great trepidation, I uninstalled the version of GIMP I was using – 2.8.0 – and downloaded 2.8.18. I’d read the changes the developers had noted, and they looked pretty daunting. GIMP has never been an easy ride for me. And then I took the ‘Download GIMP 2.8.18 directly’ option, and crossed my fingers. One of the things I noticed after the uninstall, was that all my GIMP picture files remained, but were blank. This is pretty scary for someone who is as much a know-nothing when it comes to this sort of thing, so I kept those fingers crossed and let the download complete, before hitting the setup.exe file, and following the directions all over again. That part was easy. Of course, the first thing I did was to click on a recently created file to see if it would work with the new ...