 Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Jackie. My first book, Powerless, is coming out this year. And in this video, as you know from the title, I'm going to be revealing the cover. So Powerless is a YA sci-fi about the only girl in a family of superheroes who doesn't have powers. And when she is kicked out of home with the ultimatum to get powers, she needs to decide how far she'll go to get them. If you are curious to learn more about the book, it is up on Amazon for pre-order now. It should be up on other retailers in the next few weeks. And you can also get a sneak peek of the first three chapters on my website. So the link to that will be in the description. So in this video, as I mentioned, I'm going to be doing a cover reveal. However, I thought it might also be interesting to talk about the way I worked with my designer, given that I am not a visual person and I had no idea what I wanted to have on my cover. And depending on the designer you work with, that may or may not be a problem. Like one of the designers I reached out to actually had an inquiry form on her website and one of the fields was something like, please describe what you'll see on the cover. And she gave an example of a woman riding a unicorn through a forest, like looking over her shoulder because she's being pursued. And I had no ideas like that. And I imagine that's the case for a lot of authors because we are writers rather than visual artists. So how did I approach things? Well, I didn't have a specific image I wanted on the cover, but I had put a lot of thought into it. I knew what was appropriate for the genre. I had examples of other covers I liked. I knew the text that needed to be there. I knew the dimensions of the book. So I basically created a briefing document with all of the information I did have. This document is now 64 pages. I'll need to double check to see how much of that is actually brief because my designer and I ended up using it as a working document so he added all of the concepts to the end. But I'm guessing the original brief would have been somewhere between 20 and 30 pages. So there was a lot of information in there. This information included first the required outputs. So this is the different deliverables I wanted the designer to give me. So that included the artwork for the cover. So whatever the illustration was, I was hoping to get that separate to the cover itself. I obviously needed the book cover. So in my case, I'm going to be publishing Powerless as an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover. So I would need a JPEG for the ebook cover. And then for both the paperback and hardback, I'd need a print-ready PDF that included the front cover, back cover, and spine. I also liked the idea of working with the same designer on my marketing content. So one of the things I included in the brief was all of the social media and marketing assets I required. So in the required deliverables, I had Facebook cover, LinkedIn cover, Twitter cover, Advertisings. So images for Instagram and Bookbub. And I also had a book trailer, which probably not going to do just because there are so many other things to do. But it was one of the nice to have's and I included examples of other book trailers in there. The brief started with this list of all of the things I wanted the designer to deliver to me. And at the end I had a comment saying for all of the assets I wanted the files to be provided as a photoshop or in-design file so there were editable layers. So what that means is when it came to things like advertising I could always change out the text to see which artwork might get better results. After the deliverables the next section of my brief was about the book. So this is all background that gives the designer context they need to create a good cover. Now ideally the designer would read the book but depending on the designer they may or may not. My designer ended up reading the first eight chapters to get a sense of the book. So what I included in this section was the genre, a little bit about the setting, a bit about the main character and what she looked like in case she appeared on the cover, and then the book description which is the text I'm currently using for the blurb if I don't come up with anything better, and the target audience. So what we have so far is required deliverables about the book and then the next section is specifications. So these are all a nitty gritty details. So it included the text that goes on the cover so for me that was title, author, had the publisher name and logo, had the back cover copy, and then the specifications for each of the three formats I'm publishing in. So I'm publishing through Amazon KDP as well as IngramSpark and each of them have the required specifications on their website. So for the ebook it needed to be high res jpeg, there were certain dimensions needed to hit for the payback, I needed to provide the trim size of the cover, how thick the spine was, what the required margins were, so margin is the space between the edge of the design and any key elements. So a key element is most likely going to be text and also the bleed. So this is the amount you want the design to extend beyond the edge of the design so it can be trimmed. So if you imagine you've got this bit of paper with your design and then it gets guillotine to size, if the design you provide is the exact size that it's getting cut there's a chance it might not get cut exactly at the right level so you could end up with little bits of white around the edges. So if you have the bleed around the edges, once it's printed and once it's trimmed the color will go all the way to the edges. I also included links to my barcodes here as well as links to templates. So both IngramSpark and Amazon will create templates for your print ready files and if you do distribute through multiple platforms like I'm doing it's really important to check the specifications of each because in my case my spines are two different widths even though the book has the same number of pages. Clearly Amazon uses different paper to IngramSpark so Amazon's spine is slightly thicker than the IngramSpark one so if I had the same cover file for each it wouldn't have been properly aligned. So after the cover specifications the next section was reference images. So these are a whole lot of images of covers of books with the same audience as mine, YA girls, as well as in the same or similar genres mostly science fiction some fantasy. While it's possible to just provide the images in no context I really wanted whichever designer I worked with to understand why I liked certain things as well as any thoughts I had on how different styles could be applied to the cover of powerless. So under each reference or each group of references in the case where I had a whole series I had a paragraph or two explaining why I liked it and how I thought it would apply. So one example is I had the legend born series as an example of reference covers and I wrote that the reason I liked it was because I really liked the character design and if we had Hannah on the front cover I'd like her to be drawn in a similar way. However I noted that the font used on the cover of these books wasn't really appropriate for powerless because it used seraph fonts. Seraphs to me feel like they're far more appropriate in fantasy whereas sci-fi tends to use sans seraph fonts so this is something I wanted the designer to be aware of. After that I then did the same thing for social media so for each of the social media assets I wanted I included the specifications and then I included some reference images and in these cases I went to the social media profiles and websites of different authors that I like and I just took screenshots of some of the different images and banners that I thought had been done well. And then the final section was for advertising where I did the same thing so I want to advertise on both bookbub and instagram which will require designs so I had the measurements for both of these as well as some examples of bookbub ads I thought had been done well. So how did this massive document work out for me? Well what's interesting is the first designer I sent this information to said that this showed him he wasn't a fit for the project which is actually a really good result. You see almost all of the covers I shared had illustrated artwork and I originally expected powerless would be an illustrated cover and what this designer said was he's not an illustrator. Basically if I had someone else do the artwork then he could create the cover layout using it but he wouldn't be a fit for this project. So that was a really good result because if I hadn't done this document and had potentially started working with him I probably would have ended up very disappointed. When it came to the designer who did end up doing the cover he was actually a former colleague of mine from back when I was living in Switzerland and the first thing he said when he saw it was oh I've missed these detailed briefs so this level of information might feel like overkill but it is appreciated especially if you can't give concrete direction when it comes to the specific visuals you want on your cover which was the case with me. So the way he and I worked was I sent through the briefing document he said yes I'm happy to work on this with you I think I can achieve what you want. We had a kickoff call and at that call he basically asked about different things that were missing so he wanted some more information on the setting so I'd already included a little bit about the setting. The book is set in Sudovia which is fake Estonia where I was living and what I added was some locations that are significant in the book where key scenes happen and I added reference photos for those. So one example is the main character spends some time in the country estate of the Russian mafia family so I went googling like Russian oligarch mansions and included a whole lot of photos of these places with white marble and gold leaf so very fancy. Similarly another part of the book takes place in an underground vault it's a converted Cold War bunker that is used for the storage of precious artwork before auction so I had a bunch of reference photos of the bunker that had inspired this. He also wanted to know more about the characters so I added about a page about her and her personality and then reference photos for what she might look like. Now obviously she's an imaginary person there's no real world parallel for her but I was able to do photos to show things like coloring, face shape, hairstyle and clothing and then the final thing he asked for was actually ideas for what could be on the cover and like I said earlier I didn't have any ideas but he sort of pushed and said look just see what you can come up with because it's really helpful and this was actually how we worked together in the past where every time I briefed him for some design work for a marketing campaign I'd include a couple of different ideas to get started and we often didn't even go with those ideas but it was a starting point for his own brainstorming so this time I thought about okay what could work for a cover and I had this idea of the duality between Hummer's two different worlds because at the beginning she starts in her father's lab she's very isolated, very naive and then she gets thrown out into the real world where she tangles with the Russian mafia and is suddenly in this sort of gritty violent world so the first idea I had was like Hannah looking straight at the camera or the reader wearing her lab coat and in one hand she had like a test tube or a beaker and in the other hand she had a gun because I thought that would help symbolize the two worlds the next idea was similar like the same split between the two worlds but it was about people so I thought like close up of Hannah's face or eyes and behind her we'd have two other characters one is Maria who is her older sister who's a superhero with fire powers and who sort of symbolizes the world she left behind and then there's Lisa who is the granddaughter of the boss of the Russian mafia who sort of symbolizes the new world that Hannah's found herself in and then the third idea was more symbolic so I thought we could lean into the fake science of the book and we could either have like a stylized DNA illustration or an image of what it looks like when you're looking at bacteria through a microscope. So those were the ideas I added to the brief we caught up a week later I had added to the brief he'd read through the first eight chapters of the book and he had all of these ideas it was great and one of the ideas he had that I really loved was the idea of using DNA as a symbol of like Hannah's imprisonment or being trapped one of the ideas he said was using DNA as like handcuffs another one was using it as a cage or a prison cell so as soon as he said that I'm like yes let's run with this about a week after that he sent through three concepts one of them was just the concept there was no contest and we ran with that direction so now let's reveal the cover I love this cover so much I've never seen anything like it I think my designer did an incredible job and I thought I just break down some of the little bits and pieces that are significant but you won't know they're significant if you haven't read the book so first we have the two hands holding a beaker in one and a gun in the other and this is to symbolize the duality of the main character's life because at the beginning she starts in her father's lab which is you know very sterile she's very locked up it's almost like a Cinderella element because she's treated so badly by most of her family and then when she's kicked out of home she finds herself on the streets of Sudovia and ends up tangling with the Russian mafia and finds herself in this world which is much more gritty and violent than what she's used to but if you look closely this is where you get some of the really cool details so the beaker on the left hand side this could have just been like a beaker or a test tube that had some sort of chemical mixture in it but you can see there's fire on the top of it and that relates to Hannah's older sister Maria who's a superhero and who has fire powers but it also links to a lab accident that happens in the very first chapter so really cool little detail there and then around the rim of the beaker there's actually drops of blood and this links to the violence that there is in the book because it can be violent at times but it also links to Hannah's tendency to self-harm and then if you look at the text on the beaker it's actually in Cyrillic not the Latin alphabet so a nice little nod to the fact that this is northeastern Europe it is said in a country that borders Russia there are Russians in the book so great little detail if we look at the background behind the hands we can see like the silhouette of Hannah's head and inside the head you can see the background of the lab whereas outside the head you can see more of the cities so there are some shots of Caxlina, Sudovia where the book is set, this is based on Talinastonia so you have that beautiful medieval architecture and then the final bit I wanted to call out was the cuffs that are holding her wrists because if you look closely these are actually DNA and I love this idea so much because first people in this book who have a gene mutation get superpowers so there's a DNA element to it there but also Hannah's father is the geneticist who discovered the gene mutation she wants to be a geneticist when she grows up so you know DNA is actually really important to her it's something that interests her it's her aspiration for when she grows up but at the same time it's you know this chain that's keeping her locked up because she has this mutation she should have powers and she doesn't and she is seen as an outcast within her own family because of it so there's this thing that really interests her and that she wants to pursue but it's also keeping her imprisoned so that's why we've got it as the cuffs and also why we've got like the spikes on the end of the DNA in the first draft of this concept and my designer had it without the spikes and it felt a little bit too much like jewelry it felt a little bit like I know something you might see on a 50 shades of gray type of cover and I want it to be like spiky to create that sense of conflict so it's not like oh playful bondage restraint it was like no debilitating restraint so that is the breakdown of the cover of powerless I hope you love it I love it I think my designer did an amazing job if you're interested in learning more about the book you can get a sneak peek of the first three chapters on my website jackalandpretty.com and the e-book is also already available on amazon other than that I hope you're having a great day great night whenever it is wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye