This past week, a well-known and well-respected male/male romance author took over an hour out of her day to chat with me on Facebook Messenger about how to improve my books and thereby, hopefully, improve my visibility and sales. I’m not naming her here because I don’t know if she would want me to.
Among her suggestions were rewriting the blurbs on my books and creating more professional-looking, cohesively-branded covers for them. After talking to her, I got to work redoing the cover for Future and Past (Ebb & Flow 2), since that’s the next book I’ll be releasing. It took hours, because I was experimenting with font styles and colors and how to arrange things. But I *thought* I was done. I figured changing the others would be easy; I just had to change the title font and how I’d arranged it, right?
Wrong. Yesterday, I sat down to do the other covers for that series and quickly realized that while I could just change the text on the Ebb and Flow cover, the other three books in the series needed to be done from scratch. The Hooch and Howls (Malachi’s Ebb & Flow prequel) cover was blurry because I’d downloaded the wrong size of the “person” picture, and I wanted to fix that. The covers for Storm and Shelter (Ebb & Flow 3, coming in October) and Heart and Home (Quinn’s Ebb & Flow prequel, which is currently on my Free Reads page to sign up for a free download), needed to be redone because the pictures I’d originally used for “Quinn” on those covers were sized such that the title space on the new versions covered the lower part of his face. Since part of the point of redoing the covers was to get away from the “text over the guy’s face” thing I’d done on several of them, I had to find new pictures of “Quinn” and completely redo those two covers.
I got Ebb and Flow, Hooch and Howls, and Storm and Shelter done yesterday. This morning, I sat down to do Heart and Home.
And then decided that the colors of the text and text area on the covers I’d done yesterday were too similar and too… not colorful. So today, I redid all four of the ones from yesterday, with a different color text area and using different color font on each. I started working on them around 5:30 this morning. (I couldn’t sleep, so I got up early.) And I finished at about 1:00 this afternoon, including the time it took me to replace the cover images on this website and to update the cover images on the Amazon preorders for Future and Past, and Storm and Shelter. I can’t update the images for Ebb and Flow or Hooch and Howls until I rewrite the blurbs, because the paperback covers have to match the ebook covers, and to do the new paperback covers, I need the new blurbs.
It was a lot. But I think it’s done. Here are the five new covers. What do you think?
