"Working" Covers Can Help You Write your Story #ChaBooChaLite #ChaBooCha

The above picture is of a working book cover I made for the novel I was writing a couple of years ago during Blog Your Book in 30 Days and Camp NaNoWriMo.  It is not the official cover for the book. The final book cover will probably look nothing like the above image. But it was fun to make and having an image to have in place for the book cover gave me a bit of a kick in the pants to keep writing.

During NaNoWriMo, members are encouraged to create a book cover to use as a thumbnail image for their project. I think it can be just as useful during ChaBooCha. Having a working cover is an inspirational tool to use. Your story is calling to you to write it and now it has ammunition in the form of an image to call to you with.

Another trick, if you don't want to make a simple image for your book cover, or you don't have the necessary skills to do so, is to look up images of people who look like the vision you have for your characters.

Below are some random images of men and women, found easily on royalty-free image sites such as Pixabay.com:

                                

Of course, for children's books, you will most likely find images of younger people such as children or teens.

 And here are some "working" images I made for some of my children's NaNoWriMo stories a couple of years (two of whom used the covers for their published books):

Just make sure that you don't spend so much time on this that you don't get your writing done. It can be a fun and inspirational tool to use during your writing, but, used incorrectly, it can also become another distraction that keeps you from writing.

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Give-away

I create book covers, sometimes with more success than other times, using photo-manipulation, with your photos and/or stock images. Whether or not I can create your vision depends on what your vision for your cover is. I'm offering to create a "working"cover for one prize winner. If you are signed up for ChaBooCha Lite, just comment on this blog post in order to be entered to win. Winner will be chosen by a random number generator on the 30th of this month.