To Make a Series a “Boxset”

The Taste of Freedom Trilogy is a group of three books that are all one story. Each book concludes with loose ends and a “good enough for now” feeling. Beings I was just beginning this writing journey, learning the ropes–aka jumping in feet first with ideas bouncing around my brain like sausages sizzling in hot grease, I did not know that readers do not care for cliffhanger endings. Personally, I don’t mind them unless I can’t pick up the next book. I knew the books would never be released in a way that would leave anyone annoyed to have to wait–I knew no one would read them! I wasn’t advertising and at the time the covers were terrible! No one is reading them now, but I am not advertising either!

Maybe some day.

This series was started during the fall of 2015, and takes place during that time frame. I had not written anything contemporary and wanted to give it a try. It is also written in first person POV. Another first. It was never intended to be anything more than a standalone, but then the story and the characters got away from me. Struggles of writing without an outline, aka pantser. I never knew it had a name!

So after three cover changes, and biting the bullet and paying for an Adobe Stock Photo subscription I created the covers with the pink, purple and blue. I found a male model that worked for Bryant and a female character that mostly worked for Allison. Since they were not together already I had to play with photoshop and blend, adjust and merge the two photos–they are not perfect but I am satisfied with what I came up with. The overall cost if you figure each photo on the subscription is about $2.99, the entire series cost me $20.92 in licensing fees.

Recently I have been reading about readers not liking cliffhangers so I decided to begin the process of lumping the three books into a collection–by the way you cannot call it a boxset on Amazon because they do not physically come in a box! Makes sense, but it makes me giggle that someone might think an ebook could be in a box at all! Maybe an inbox?

Yesterday I downloaded far too many files on Adobe to use in making images for the “Complete Taste of Freedom Series”

I wasted most of my subscription downloads for the month. I was not careful in making sure what type of file the images were–too many were just a jpeg saved to a background with no layers–not so great for manipulating by an amatuer. Then I downloaded templates… They are Adobe Illustrator. That program is more than I can handle right now, I tried for like thirty minutes and after feeling like I was going to rip my hair out, I gave up… FOR NOW! I will learn it eventually.

The “featured image” at the top of this post was my first attempt. As you can see the covers do not have numbers on the spine and are slightly off placed. I bet you just went back to the top to check that out, didn’t you?

I then tried another image and came up with this:

I was surprised at how well it turned out! (Please don’t tell me it is bad, my spirit is crushable!)

Feeling a little brave I decided to try a trendy layout. That is the image of the books laying on a wooden table (ignore the bits of grass–they came free of charge with the image, actually it was all free as I downloaded it from Unsplash.com, credits to nathan-dumlao-tA90pRfL2gM-unsplash and to jason-wong-uSQMmCAYRMM-unsplash for the fancy cup of coffee and creamer.

The rest is all me. I used a free photoshop brush from Brusheezy.com called fibers1-titi-montoya to make the subtle lines in the edges of the pages. The rest were just jpegs of the book cover fashioned into a 3D book shape. I put this together in Photshop and used both the burn tool, and brushes to create the illusion of shadows.

The ereader was a salvaged image I downloaded from Adobe–it needs more work, but smudging the rough edges worked well enough. You just went and looked again didn’t you?

This is the series cover I doctored up in Photoshop–instead of using styles to make the rainbow effect I used multiple layers of different colors and erased parts of the layers.

I plan to release the Taste of Freedom Trilogy: Complete Series in the next week or two while I wait to get back the fourth book in the White Ice Series. I think I will be creating similar images for those too! We only get better with practice!