The Making of a Cover

When I was thinking about redoing the cover of Blink of an I (which wasn't an easy thing to decide, having put so much effort into the original cover and all), I began by trying to find a cover image that sparked me.  I scanned through hundreds of photos and what I finally decided to do was use a woman's face.  I downloaded about a dozen.  Tried some different things and finally settled on this one:

But it wasn't quite right, so I flipped it and cropped it and played with the brightness/contrast until I had this:

Added text and tweaked the image some more to get this:

but it still wasn't right.  It looked too 'women's fiction'.  I needed something more.  So I started playing with the image using the 'effects' available in my photo manipulation program.  I hit on an effect called Bas Relief and used a background color as close to indigo as I could.  (If you're read the book, you know why I went with indigo.)  And I came up with this:

Cool, but still not quite right, so I found a stairwell...

...did the bas relief thing to it, too, and then added it into the other image.  And voila!

Anyway, that's how it's done over here in 'self-published author making her own covers' land.  It takes time and patience, but on the upside, it doesn't cost me any money.