As with any author, my cover was so important to me. I can be quite fickle, *hee hee*, and I’ve judged many a book by it’s cover. After all, isn’t it appearances that drive us as consumers to pick it up in the first place?
I stumbled across a FaceBook page called Cover It Designs!. The owner, Arijana was running a competition to win a cover design amongst other things.
I’m habitually unlucky, but having checked out her designs on the page and on her website I made a snap decision that she was the cover designer for me.
Alas, I didn’t win the competition. I started to stalk her page and website…ok, that had started straight away. I’d sit there salivating over her covers, pre-designed and already owned.
I just had to have her…
And so our task began. We selected three photographs together from stock photos. I sent her several ‘could be Marc’s’ and one ‘could be Teagan’. I was rather merry after a fun session of checking out half naked male models whilst sipping delicious rose wine. Well, maybe not sipping, more like guzzling.
The next morning Arijana messaged me – ‘I hate this thing I have created.’
I immediately dismissed the message knowing that she has a dislike for ‘busy’ covers.
When I received it was like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over me.
I hated it…
I looked at the woman that I’d selected as Teagan. She was all wrong. She was like a cheap version of her…I must have been more than tipsy to have chosen that woman. It was like I had dressed my beautiful children in cloth sacks whilst gorgeous clothes remained in the wardrobe.
I set to work having realised I was looking for someone very specific. I loved the rest of the cover, so I searched for a girl who would fit with the image in my mind as well the rest of the cover.
Eventually, I found the right image. She was beautiful, no doubt, but she needed work. Poor Arijana spent hours fiddling with the image, responding to each request, faultlessly sculpting the female’s image until it was one that was good enough to be called ‘Teagan’.
When she sent me the final image I’m unashamed to say I cried. My hands shook for an hour and I stared at it for several hours…ok, seven hours in total.
I’ll never be able to comment on how other cover designers work because I’ve found the perfect one for me. The one that will work relentlessly to give me what I want and what my characters deserve.
Without further ado….
The projected release date for ‘Falling to Pieces’ is the 15th of August 2013.
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