Tinkering with Book Covers

Yet more procrastination fun besides the decluttering, adjudicating and writing - tinkering with book covers! I wasn't satisfied with some of mine and I love the creativity of working on them, even though it drives me to distraction and is time-consuming.

I also sometimes have an idea of what I want but working out how to do it is the problem. Anyway, I've now redone two and will be leaving them this way (hopefully).

The first is the cover I've always had the most problem with since the novella Pride & Progress was published. I already shared a couple of earlier versions ages ago but was still not quite happy with the one I ended up using. Since I'm in a more energetic mood at the moment, I decided to have one last shot before getting new postcards for the SAW Conference in March.

It's a sweet Victorian novella which revolves around Miss Emily Morton's distaste for the new railway and her growing friendship with the new Scottish stationmaster. At their first meeting, Emily literally lands at Arthur Muir's feet at the bottom of a hill! Since I partly wrote it because of my love of steam trains, I've always wanted one on the cover - and this is the result. Maybe not perfect but I like it!

The other books I've always struggled with in my own mind ever since they were published as three separate novella by a small publisher, are the Aphrodite and Adonis series. The problem is that they can be read as stand alone stories - the only link between them is that Aphrodite and Adonis appear in each (as real people) to help the three different couples.

They're set on Cyprus as that's where I came up with the original idea while on holiday there many years ago. I loved the mythology attached to the island as well as the historic sites and had to use it. Aphrodite is said to have been born from the foam of the sea at Paphos, where we stayed, and I've always been really keen on Greek mythology.

I did think having three novellas was a bit messy, especially when the first is much shorter than the other two. So I decided to put them into one volume - not a box set as such, more a trilogy of novels. Again, I tried a couple of different cover ideas, changed my mind on Amazon and separated them again (giving away the second novella for a few days last year). But I kept coming back to the idea of putting them all in one book.

So at last, I'm happy with this latest result. The photo image is actually at the rocks where Aphrodite appeared but daughter thought it was too non-fiction/travel like with only that. After some thought, I had to agree though I still wanted to use that lovely image. So to make it more obviously a romance, I've added a couple plus made the font bigger and a different colour! It's been difficult to decide on a cover for this series as it combines real, contemporary romance with a touch of fantasy. Hopefully, I'll now leave it this way, as one volume of three novellas.

So that's why the blog hasn't been updated for a couple of weeks! No doubt I'll be tinkering with another couple of covers as there's still two at least that I need to improve.

Rosemary