Making the cover for Abby: A Sentient Calculator Watch Romance was kind of a pain in the ass.
With Gage and Marc, I was able to easily photobash the covers by finding women’s hands holding stuff, then just putting a ruler and a marker in their place. Sure, there was some fine-tune-photoshopping, but they weren’t too difficult. I was able to do most of what I needed in Canva.
And luckily, the cover for Drew was hella easy, too. I just took the super lazy route of changing the color on the cap of Marc 😂
But with a calculator watch, it was much harder.
I almost resorted to taking a picture of my non-photogenic hand holding a watch, but luckily I was able to find a picture of something that worked.
The calculator watch, to put in her hand, though…that was a problem…
I couldn’t use something branded, because getting sued isn’t something I’m interested in pursuing. I knew I’d need to find some calculator watch and put my exorbitant Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to good use. But, I couldn’t really find any images online that I could purchase for commercial use to then manipulate. So…I had to buy a damn watch and photograph it myself!
Eventually I found a yellow kid’s calculator watch that I thought could work.
I pulled out my credit card and dusted off my “actually has an art degree” skills to convert the following yellow watch into the pink one you now see on the cover:
Please note, I said “actually has an art degree” not “actually has a photography degree” and definitely made my life harder with my bad photographing skills.
I did a lot of “transform manipulation” and color adjusting. It’s not perfect, but it works 😂
The hardest part was getting the yellow to look like a not-hideous pink. I wanted the Gage and Abby covers to have opposite colors and got super close. Go me!
Annoyingly, A FUCKING PINK VERSION of that damn watch actually exists, and I did order one, but it took so long to get to me I had to make due with the yellow one.
Fun fact: the pink one I ordered was delivered right as I was finalizing the book’s files 😂
It came just in time for me to post this sexy picture of myself in bed with all my book boyfriends.
I never specified what Abby’s brand was, because, like I said, I don’t want to get sued. All I ever said in the book was that he is “not a Casio.” Funnily enough, there is a pink “not a Casio” calculator watch called…Abigail 😂 And it’s the right color! I maybe could have spent a lot more money and a lot less Photoshop-ing to get that watch to look like Abby 😅 But it might have been harder to make it look less branded and also…I had no idea it existed. I only discovered it through Googling my book 😂😂
Unfortunately, I can’t say that it was Diana’s actual watch and pretend that I planned this coincidence all along, because the watch was made after Diana got her pink calculator watch that turned into a “perfect blond husband.”
All this is to say, I probably will not be shoving such complicated objects up my FMC’s cooches in the future. I think I have an idea for how to do the Rosa (aka Ferrari) cover that will hopefully be non-sueable…but we’ll see…