New season - a contemporary new look!

 

I'm rolling out a totally NEW contemporary look to all my Kindle book covers and social media pages for the new season - with paperbacks available soon!

 

Let me know what you think?

 

 

 

 

Janice xx

 

 

It’s a Whiteout Writeout…!

Yes, that's really me – on the hill at the back of our cottage and holding my sister’s Labrador puppy out of the snow . It’s a whiteout again here in Scotland and despite the slightly longer days, the promise of Springtime is nowhere to be seen. There are no daffodils in bloom, no buds on the trees, and my poor hens won’t come out of the hen hoose. I know how they feel!

But it’s not all bad, as this weather has been super conducive to writing, and while holed up in the cottage I’ve been working on my new book. It’s a nonfiction guide to online promotion and its title is How To Promote Party Online with all the emphasis on fun. Thank you so much for all your comments last week, which were all super helpful.

I’m hoping to show you the cover next week, as I’ve seen a couple of drafts and my wonderful designer is soooo close to the final version now.

So, I’m going to ignore the whiteout and I’m going back indoors to write.

I could be some time!

What are you doing while the winter lingers on – are you doing lots of writing or reading or both….?

 

Janice xx

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover?

Please let me introduce to you my very first guest blogger who is a fabulous author and also a dear friend, Kenneth Rosenberg.

Thanks so much to Janice for letting me guest post on her blog this week!  I thought I’d talk about something that she and I have in common as “indie” authors, and that is cover design.  Or more specifically, title, cover, blurb, marketing and everything else that independent authors have to take care of all on their own!

Followers on this blog know about Janice’s recent cover re-design and branding effort.  She’s done a terrific job tying together her cover for Bagpipes and Bullshot with her forthcoming Reaching for the Stars, as well as this blog. 

For a traditionally published author, this is the type of thing that a publishing company would normally take care of, but not so for us indies!  We have to figure this stuff out all on our own.

When I came out with my first novel No Cure for the Broken Hearted at the beginning of this year, I came up with the title, wrote the blurb and designed the cover.  I was happy with the outcome, though I still didn’t know what to expect when it finally went live. 

I tried to temper my expectations.  Would I sell a few hundred copies?  A few thousand?  I had no idea.  Maybe I’d earn enough money to buy myself a cup of coffee every day?  It ends up, the book took off almost from the start and managed around 25,000 copies sold in the first six months.

When my next book came out last month, I tried to temper my expectations again, though this time it wasn’t so easy.  Even if I only sold half as many copies as the first, it would be a great success.  I came up with the title Sweet Ophelia and the Tinseltown Blues.  I thought it reflected the off-beat style of the book; a story of love and redemption set in Hollywood.  I designed a cover with a face representing the character Ophelia.  The book went live and… crickets.

In the entire first week that my book was on sale, I only had one sale on Amazon UK, and that was to Janice! (Thanks, BTW).  In the next three weeks, I managed about one sale per week.  Sales on Amazon U.S. were only slightly better.

So what went wrong?  Was it the title?  The cover?  The blurb?  The sample?  It was hard to say for sure.  Perhaps the book just isn’t connecting with readers, but I feel pretty good about it myself.  There’s nothing I can or would change about the book at this point. 

And so I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to come up with a new title and cover.  This is one of the great things about independent publishing.  Maybe I don’t have a big publishing company behind me, test marketing covers and titles and doing promotions, but on the flip side, I can make changes to this sort of thing at will.

A publishing company would have a print run, and ads running, and hard copies out to reviewers.  Once a title was set, that would be it.  Writers like Janice and myself can make changes to these things almost instantly.  We can see what works and what doesn’t, and move ahead accordingly.

So far I’ve been throwing around ideas and bouncing them off of friends and family, but now I thought I’d throw it out to readers here to see what people think.  Should I give it some more time with the current cover and title?  Or change it ASAP?  Any ideas for new titles? 

I look forward to your comments, and remember, honesty is the best policy!

Kenneth Rosenberg's Blog

Kenneth's books on Amazon UK

Kenneth's books on Amazon.com

A Cover Story...

Lately I’ve been thinking about the value of good cover design. As an indie author with my second e-book due out at the end of the year, I’m already starting to imagine how the cover might look. One of the joys of being independently published is that I get to design and choose a book cover myself.  The only problem is that it’s really hard to come up with something that says ‘sassy, sexy but broken, media-stalked celebrity chef goes awol’ using a single image whether that is with a slick photograph or snappy illustration!



With Bagpipes & Bullshot I designed the cover myself after purchasing a stock image and I think it works really well. I’ve actually been complimented on this cover several times on Twitter! However, bringing out a second title has brought up a whole new issue and that is how to make it instantly clear to readers that this new book is written by the same author i.e. me.



I checked out the Amazon listings and some authors stand out from the crowd as having branded themselves and their books really well. It seems to me that Fantasy and Thriller genre writers are particularly good at this. Just look at these fabulous covers on George R R Martin’s books:

In the Chick Lit genre, I think there’s no better example than Talli Roland’s book covers. Interestingly, Talli’s publisher redesigned the first cover of The Hating Game when they noted sales falling back a little just after publication and then watched sales soar again with this fresh new colourfully illustrated design. Cleverly, they have followed it up with a strikingly similar cover for Talli’s new book Watching Willow Watts which is due out in September as an e-book.

My next book ‘Reaching for the Stars’ is about a disillusioned celebrity chef. The genre is contemporary romantic fiction. Bagpipes & Bullshot is in that category too - but as neither my sexy chef nor my gorgeous bagpipe playing hero would be seen dead wearing pink - what’s this author to do? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m having the job done by a professional and, having discussed ideas, have now contracted out both books to an experienced cover designer. It’s all very exciting. So do come back soon when I promise all will be revealed!

In the meantime, what do you like to see on a book cover? An illustration, a photograph, a headless woman/man, landscapes, seascapes, houses, trees, shoes and handbags, the list of options is endless - and what about colours - what’s in and what’s out? Please do leave a comment and feel free to follow my blog. In most cases I’m almost always going to follow you back.