Recruit casual artists for covers. #86
Description
This project is to find and recruit artists to do covers for WWW books and give them all the information that they might need.
Background
White Water Writers is growing significantly and that is revealing some minor issues. One of which is that our covers aren't particularly great, and they are getting harder and harder to produce (we're running out of stock photography). We've had some really good covers some out of school volunteers, but that's not reliable.
Given we are a charity, we can't afford professional cover layout because that would just pass the costs directly to schools and other organisations.
I was at MCM Comic Con in mid October, and many of the comic artists were offering sketches for £5-20. These sketches weren't good enough to use as covers, but certainly they were close for our purposes and it certainly felt like £50-worth of sketching would give us something reasonable. The key here is that we aren't asking the artists to work more cheaply - we're just accepting a very cheap style. We'd have to give fewer books to schools to make that work, but it might work out best.
Ideally, of course, we'd work with a selection of different artists, so the covers didn't look too 'Samey'.
There's three ways this could work, in, I assume, descending levels of artist-friendliness
- I book in an artist in advance for a week "You are going to be given a brief on Monday and you must deliver by 3pm Friday"
- I send out the brief to interested parties "I need someone to do this brief by 3pm Friday, who fancies it?"
- I let the kids pick from a shortlist "Some children need you to do this by 3pm Friday"
Plan
- Worked my way around all of the artists with stalls at Comic Con.
- Done a first-pass in person shortlisting, there were various reasons that some stalls were rejected:
- some artists didn't produce sketches that actually looked good,
- some artists were clearly too expensive
- some artists had a nice big crowd of people and I didn't have time,
- some basically only drew nude or erotic work or I just got a strange vibe.
- Go through the cards you picked up, check instagrams and do a second shortlist
- Draft email for the group
- Check in with Richard about reducing the number of copies of the book to pay for the covers
- Send emails, with an effort to customise details
- Trial three of the artists and itterate the process. Get feedback.
- Add the introductory email as content in this issue
- Open issue out publically for comment
- Open issue out to recruit more artists to get to a stable cohort.
Resources for artists
- Invoicing template if you haven't sent an invoice before
- Introduction Email
- General details email
- Amazon Cover template generator - you aren't being paid for a full cover, you are being paid for an image someone else will put on it. But some artists like doing the whole cover anyway (for portfolios, or because they don't like how Joe 'fixes' their art 🤣). If you fancy putting it into a cover template, this is the one to use.
- Examples of draft and final deliverables from one of the artists:
