What's in a cover?…
New cover, old book.…I have to share my new cover with you because the unrequited artist in me loves it. The awesome Kim Killion designed it. I used to think my former print publisher had the best cover designers around, but IMHO, the cover they originally designed for this book isn't as good as the one Kim did. It is such a luxury to be able to have some influence on the final product! Kim did her best to make it look the way I wanted it to.
"The Love of a Stranger" was originally released in 2004. If you want to see the original cover, just follow the link to Amazon.
I got the copyright back from the print publisher. I've been diligently working on formatting it for Kindle, Nook and other digital readers. I'm almost finished. Hopefully, I'll be uploading it within the next two weeks. I'll keep you posted.
Here's what my little pea brain sees when I look at this. The masculine hands scream "alpha hero." The woman's hair says gorgeous blonde. The pose itself suggests a sexy relationship. And the isolated house on a bluff spells intrigue. What do you think?
Some of you might have already read this book, but if you haven't, does this new cover make you want to? Let me know. To me, your opinion is important.
Cover design is the front line of marketing a book. In New York publishing, a lot goes into it. Books are, more often than not, impulse buys. The goal of an alluring cover is to make a customer/reader strolling down the aisle think, "Oh, wow, I have to read that book," and thus, buy it.
But things have changed in book marketing. Nowadays, e-books hold a larger share of the market. E-book covers have to be even more attractive and more sensational. Smaller picture, different shopper.
The next most important element of marketing a book is the blurb on the back cover. When and if that potential reader is captured by the cover design and stops and picks up the book, turns it over and reads the back, the blurb has to be intriguing, too. In e-books, since there's no back cover, the blurb becomes the book description on the listing page. If you've checked out the book descriptions on "Sweet Water" and "Salvation, Texas," you'll see that the descriptions are now longer and more detailed.
I'll be revising this book's description before I upload it. In a print book, space is limited, but online, there's a little more room.
Aside from the way the book looks, in the course of formatting it, I've run across some funny things. I hadn't read it since I originally wrote it in 2002 and 2003. Back then, every person in the whole wide world didn't have a cell phone. But I gave one to these story characters, trying to make them look hip and sophisticated and a little ahead of the curve. How hip could they have looked if they'd had iPads?
At the time this story was penned, communication by email was limited, so the story people had to use a fax machine. Twitter and Facebook didn't exist, so social media weren't a part of the story. Not too many blogs existed either. How time flies. And how things change in 7 or 8 years.
I had to decide if I wanted to update the book to take in all of the changes in our society or just leave it as I wrote it. I finally decided to leave it alone. I've made a few revisions to tighten here and there, have corrected some flaws that existed and have changed some dialogue to something I thought might be more effective. Otherwise, the book remains as I wrote it.
More to come…
Anna
