It was another quieter week on the book series release front. I did have an email about a promo I had booked for January that had been scheduled to go out January 14, but which was now scheduled for January 12, and while I was fine with the January 14 date, moving it up to January 12 seems even better since that is my official release date. So, I’m going to take that as a good sign from the universe.
Otherwise the big task this week was working on the cover for Book 3 in the series. I still need to make a few finalizations, so the cover reveal will wait until next week. Designing this cover took slightly longer than the other two because unlike with those books I hadn’t settled on a piece of artwork I wanted to use for the cover yet. I had a general idea in mind, but that was all.
I played around with two different photos to use as the background image on the cover. By the way, when I’m still deciding on artwork for the cover I don’t yet purchase the images but simply use a screenshot of the image with the watermarks visible. So, I worked up two basic versions of the cover, and wasn’t one hundred percent positive which one I preferred. There was one I was leaning toward, though.
So, I reached out to an independent arbiter. Read: I sent a text to my boyfriend Ron. He answered correctly and said he liked both but there was one he preferred, and it turned out to be the one I was leaning toward too. So, that was an easy decision. And now that I’ve downloaded the full non-watermarked sharp and clear version of the photo I’m convinced it was definitely the right choice.
The design work does take some time, though in the case of the series, a lot of choices have already been made and it’s just a matter of updating title text and series number. There is one task that always takes me far too long, and that is writing what some call the blurb and some call the jacket flap copy. I’m talking about the text that appears on the back of your book (or on the book description section for online retailers) that is supposed to give a snapshot sort of summary of your book that entices potential readers to buy your book.
Technically, this is something I could complete long before I start work on the cover, but I don’t because I find the task so difficult and unpleasant that I put it off for as long as I possibly can. Distilling a 70,000 word book into a few short paragraphs that are easy to understand and also serve as a sort of advertising pitch for the book is no easy feat, let me tell you. So, I am not exaggerating when I tell you it took me hours to write the blurb for the book, and I’ll probably take another look at it before I finalize the cover design to see if it can be improved on at all.
So, that plus a cover reveal and uploading the book to various retailers for preorder are on my to-do list for next week. Until then, I hope you all have a good and productive week.
