“Junie Jamieson, Snoopy Reporter” was initially planned to be a novelette, somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 words, first draft written in about a week and published within seven days. It was initially inspired by an image, this image:
(There were also a number of images of women in bitchsuits that were relevant like this one
but I rejected them outright as cover art because it might make readers think the story was all about pet play, and it's not.)
The story turned out to be a novel, and the image didn't make it to the cover, first of all because I didn’t have copyright to it, and even if I DID have copyright to it, I couldn’t use it as is because it has naughty bits visible. I didn’t try to work out a Second Life version that would be acceptable because I didn’t think Second Life could do it justice even without the nudity issue. Wenona is the model in the pic, and the way her legs are spread wide by the bondage, and their nakedness, and the way that sign dangles obscenely from the buttplug stuck in her ass are what makes the pic powerful visually. Her athleticism and general bendiness contribute a lot to the power of the image. (House of Gord gets credit for the imaginative kinkiness of the pose.) No way could Second Life come close to replicating that, with only my meager artistic skills to work it.
So I went with a more generic image, Junie practically naked in a submissive posture (kneeling with her legs spread wide, hands behind her back) and gagged and hooded, with gangsters in the middle ground and an urban cityscape in the background. I found me some gangster-ish images and a background image on Deposit Photos and went to Second Life and made up a Junie avatar, then made a test cover to try it out and came up with this:
I was not happy with it and not just because it was just four inches tall. I saved it at that size because that’s about the size it appears to be on the book’s view page – check it for yourself if you like. You can see the image full size by clicking on it, but you have to sell the reader with the image they see when they reach the page, not what they see if they click on the image.
The first reason I didn’t like the image was that the hands behind back kneeling pose left the avatar’s shoulders missing, or at least looking horribly deformed. I checked on some real life images of women kneeling with their hands behind their backs to see what they looked like, and what do you know, their shoulders did not vanish or look particularly deformed.
That was an easy fix, I just took another pick of the avatar standing (using a gray screen, which tends to work better for my purposes than a green screen) and grafted her shoulders back on.
But even worse than the shoulders was the hood. Yeah, it was in keeping with story, very much so, but it just looked all kinds of wrong, especially at that four inch size, but also at full size. See what I mean?
At the four inch size, Junie's masked face is not even recognizable as human.
So I removed the hood, ring gag and posture collar from the avi and replaced it with a simple ball gag and a head of red hair and took another green screen shot with natural shoulders and pasted THAT on the kneeling Junie. Much better.
And prior to that, I also changed Junie’s costume out because although I liked the thong bottom just fine, I didn’t like the see-through bra. It just didn’t flatter the avatar’s figure all that much. So I switched them out for the brass chains outfit which I thought did a much better job of showing off the avatar’s figure.
Finally, the background was just way too dark. The gangsters, who were basically silhouettes, got swallowed up in it, as did hooded Junie. (Redhead Junie, not so much.) So I found a lighter background that did a much better job of separating foreground, middle ground and background. And Voila! Cover art:
All it took was hours of work. A pro artist would have probably made a better cover in fifteen minutes, if only because they would not have made the mistakes I did in the first place. But also because they would probably have come up with a much better cover concept than I did in the even firster place.
But I do recommend test covers for self-published authors who do their own covers. They let you literally see your mistakes. And thanks to this piece, gentle reader, YOU got to see my mistakes, too. Fun all around!
Oh, and as for the image that inspired the story: it did make it it into the story, in an important scene. If you read the book, you’ll know EXACTLY which scene, because I followed the inspirational art almost exactly. That, at least, I could do.
Now the question is, how do I manage to create novelettes instead of novels from these inspiring images? I’ll be working on that!
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