Judging A Book By Its Cover

My students are always tossing books back into the pile because they don't like the covers. While I chide them to read the back, give it a flip through, or scan the first page I have to admit that I'm as guilty as the next of the same thing. Therefore, when Solstice opened the door for us to contract for our own cover artists I ran with it. I loved the cover I got from Solstice for The Shattered Prism. It was so cool and such a neat fantasy cover. I actually requested the same artist when it was time to design the cover for Walking With Shadows. I was told, at the time, that first artist no longer worked for Solstice, so I went with another. The second artist tried. She really did, to match the look of the first cover. It was alright, but never thrilled me as much as that first one.

Fast forward almost an entire school year. I finish Dark Rainbow's End and start shopping around for cover artists. I track down the artist from book one and ask her to do the cover for book three. I'm blown away. Now, I'm in a bit of a quandry. Do I keep book two's cover? Even though it doesn't stylistically match book one and three now? Or do I pony up the cash and get book two's cover redone? I thought about it for a good long while. I flipped through other trilogies on my shelf. The fact that they all had the same stylistic covers decided me. I had the cover redone.

So, now, it's live all over Amazon and now just updated here on my blog. I have to admit, while one person I showed it to said it was busy, it got a lot of traffic by my table at DukCon. Shadows and Rainbow were the two cards that were more often than not picked up.

We'll see if it helps with the sales. I wonder how many other people judge books by their covers? Here it is . . .

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adventure in Self-Publishing

So, I'm attempting something this summer that I've never before thought I'd attempt. I'm going to try to publish a couple of smaller pieces myself instead of going through my publisher. Now, that doesn't mean that I have anything against my publisher. I don't. I love my editor and I've had nothing but a positive experience with them. However, I've been hearing over and over at the various conventions I've gone to this year that indie, what used to be called self, publishing is the way to go to really earn money. Here's a fact of life in publishing, no matter the means....you need to spend money to make money. That doesn't mean that you pay a vanity press to publish your manuscript. No, a publisher should always pay you and not the other way around. What I mean is that the publisher or the author, depending on who is putting out the book, is going to need to pony up some cash for marketing. Now, unless you're Stephen King or your publish
Read more

And Promo is the Name of the Game

We're at T-2 days until the start of summer vacation. Ah yes, summer vacation....that time of year when I can have bathroom breaks when I want them, take more than 10 minutes to eat lunch and I can drink a pot of coffee after 3pm. Glorious days. Anyway, back to the point. This summer, I decided that in order to make a little money, I'll have to spend a little money. I heard something at the RWA (Romance Writers of America) Chicagoland Spring Fling this year, "you have to give away a bunch of books before you sell a bunch of books." Huh? That refrain, have free stories, novellas even novels up on Amazon was repeated over and over again. Of course, I thought, these are those people who can crank out two hundred pages in two weeks. That's not me. I am a slow writer. A book and a novella a year, maybe with another story tossed in, is as quick as I can write. Can I? Well, this got me thinking. So, during May I set aside the full-length novel I was working on (another
Read more

Girls with Spunk

Katniss. Hermione. Lessa. Polgara. Lady Macbeth. Alright, I'll even give you Jane Eyre, but I refuse to add Bella into the mix of heroines who I believe are really kick ass. Now, admittedly, most of them are grown women, so I don't think it's fair to really pull them into the mix. I'll stick to the girls in the group--Hermione and Katniss, and because she's their exact opposite in all ways, Bella. Think about it. Back when all we had were fairy tales told to scare children, the spunkiest of the fairy tale heroines was Gretal who had the wherewithal to shove the witch in the oven and free her brother. I suppose she was one of the first heroines who really took the story in her own hands and proved to the world that we were more than damsels in distress waiting languidly in some tower for Prince Charming to rescue us. Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White--all waiting around for a prince to come and save them. Or in Cinderella's case weeping for a Fairy Godmot
Read more