An Author’s Musing: Book Covers

Look. I’m only a day late this time! I’m improving! And be warned, this post contains a lot of images. 

Recently, I have been thinking about book covers. I love book covers. Some are so pretty! They are creative and just gorgeous to look at. One of my favorites is for a series called The Last Year, by Tricia Leigh. It is a sci-fi, YA, dystopian, alien adventure series that I first discovered five years ago. (I don’t read just historical fiction.)

The first cover is interesting and caught my attention.

But it is only when you have all four books, you see the big picture. 

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Now, I don’t think I will ever have the creativity to pull something like that off. But my series does have a theme of my main character slowly turning around so you can see her. That counts as being interesting, right?

Anyway, being an independent author, I have the power to update my book covers. There’s only one of my books that I have done this multiple times for: Emily’s Choice. I was on a small budget so I decided to do this one all on my own. (Disclaimer: don’t do this yourself unless you know what you are doing.)

Be warned. The results are not always pretty.

Let’s start with the first, painful cover I did back when I had no idea what I was doing.

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Yeah. This does not indicate that it is a Regency Romance and I really should have known better. Let’s QUICKLY forget I ever went ahead with this to look at the second cover I tried.

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This one is a little closer to what a Regency cover might look like. The image is a public domain image painting by Vittorio Reggianini. I love, love, LOVE looking at his paintings. They are all gorgeous! Still, I think it is pretty obvious that it’s still boring. So, I made another one.

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I bought the rights for this model and used an online site to play around with it. I thought I was being clever with how she was looking up, almost as though she is thinking about the choice in front of her. It was definitely an improvement over all previous covers I had done. But, when I became more serious about self publishing, I tried again.

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Now, I’m not going to lie. This one I’m very proud of. The model is closer to what I imagine Emily to look like. The cover is bright and eye-catching. As an amateur, it’s far from perfect, but I’m keeping it for now.

My other book covers I commissioned from someone who knows what they are doing, which is the wiser thing to do. Perhaps when I become a very successful author, I will let Emily have a better cover. Oh, that would be a wonderful day…

Have a book cover that you love? Let me know what it is!