I’m SO excited to share the final cover art for Stitch! Drumroll please… Ta-da!
A big shout out to Damon over at http://damonza.com/ for bearing with me through many, many rounds of revisions until we got it just right. He’s fantastic – I really can’t say enough!
Doing the cover was probably one of the most fun aspects of this whole process. Even when you have a finished manuscript with 300+ pages and 75,000 words, it doesn’t really feel like a book. But seeing your name on the cover makes it real. I wrote a book! Look, there it is! Ahh!!!
In all seriousness, though, the cover is probably your most important selling tool, and one of the things that’s great about being a self-published author is that you have full control over how your cover looks. As a person lacking in graphic design skills, this can also be a bad thing (there are plenty of hideous homemade covers out there…), which is why I decided to invest some money in getting a professionally designed cover by someone who actually knows what they’re doing. It was really important to me that my book look like a “real book” and I think we’ve managed to achieve that. Yay!
One of the challenges of designing the cover is that it needs to give the reader an idea of what to expect without giving too much away, and of course also has to be compelling. And then of course there’s the “too much face” issue – since I wanted to show the characters’ eyes, I obviously needed to show some face, but my beta readers were very clear in that they didn’t want to have a face planted in their brain before they even started reading. So it was necessary to find a balance in that respect.
My book also incorporates elements of both paranormal romance and sci-fi, and it was a challenge to find a design that didn’t lean too heavily in any one direction. I wanted to keep it clean and modern – in keeping with the feel of many YA sci-fi/fantasy books lately – and I wanted to use images that would hint to the reader that this book is more than just a love story between a girl and ghost, that there is something much deeper (and more science fiction-y…) going on below the surface.
Being that this is the first book of a trilogy, I also needed a repeatable design scheme that I could use for the remaining books so that they would form a cohesive set. I was happy with this design because it provided a handful of elements which could be tweaked and reused to show the progression through the series. (Hint: there’s a teaser of book 2 – which includes the book 2 cover art – at the end of Stitch… but you’ll have to get your hands on a copy of the book to see it! Muahahahaha.)
Anyway, I’ve got to go post this baby on Facebook and other spots on my website, so I’m heading off to do that! Would love to hear what you think about the design!
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