The Great Repackaging

It may only be nine months since it came out, but I just gave the second Brain Jar Release a fresh lick of paint in the form of a cover re-design. Here it is, all shiny in its new iteration:

I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot recently, starting with the refurbishing of the Short Fiction Lab covers and the more recent decision to reformat the cover of The Birdcage Heart. it’s never a huge change–different fonts, same cover, small tweaks to the way things are presented–but it can have a big impact on the way the book looks.

The original, off-centre design for You Don’t Want To Be Published was a function of the tools available. I’m largely pulling Brain Jar Press up by its bootstraps, which means working with the tools I can afford based upon the limited monthly budget I’ve allowed and whatever’s come in with book sales. 

When I started up, twelve months back, that involved some quality time with Canva whenever I wanted to make a cover. Now I’ve upgraded to Creative Suite, giving me access to my preferred tools in Photoshop and InDesign, and I’ve got options that weren’t really available with the original tools.

This may not be the final cover for this book either–when you look at the other books in the market category, there’s a definite design aesthetic there and this version is a little too busy to look like it belongs there with them. My core goal with this particular redesign was to incorporate some of the trends in the market right now, and pull the focus away from the left-hand side of the cover before I started putting together a print edition and needed to worry about how it interacted with the book’s spine.