Judging a book by its cover


Winter is my writing time.

When the bed and breakfast business slows and the cold sets in, Chris and I go away to California to relax and rejuvenate our bodies and minds. And, away from the siren call of house projects like painting rooms or planning garden additions, I try to reconnect with my writer spirit and channel my muse through my computer keyboard.

This winter I have been finalizing Choice. Unlike my previous fiction, the suspense novels Blood Exposure and Net Stalker, Choice is women's fiction. As I was doing the final edit from Southern California, where much of the book is set (and relishing NOT being in the midst of the horrific winter the East Coast had this year!), I found it easy to slip back into the arms of the characters once more. From the "flyleaf:"
Jody Carpenter loved and admired artist Keith Ackerman and believed their personal and creative synergy was evidence they were meant to be together. But after months of assuming their sexual impasse was due to his fear of commitment, Jody challenged Keith to prove he loved her. The fallout was immediate and enormous: Forced to acknowledge he was gay, Keith ran. And Jody found she was pregnant.

Humiliated over her failure to recognize Keith’s homosexuality, Jody nevertheless decides to keep the baby. During her pregnancy, she meets Keith’s antithesis in Alex Maclean, who wants to marry her and adopt her daughter Kendall. When Keith learns he has fathered a child and insists upon being involved in Kendall’s life, Jody, Keith and Alex come to an agreement: Alex will legally adopt Kendall while Keith continues as her “godfather,” but when she turns twenty-one, the three of them will tell her the truth of her parentage.

No one expected Keith to die a year shy of that milestone birthday.

Keith’s death throws Jody into a tailspin of long-buried emotions. Forced to reevaluate her past in order to determine which path her future will take, she wavers over the biggest question: Need she tell Kendall the truth now?  The consequences of her hesitation are swift and agonizing. In the wake of her choices past and present, Jody faces an ultimatum: Unless she can extract herself from Keith’s shadow and expunge her culpability, the price of her self-doubt may be the loss of all she loves best. 

AH, but winter sabbatical is over and we are back at work. This week, however, the B&B is quiet and so I have targeted a number of book-related tasks to accomplish. By next week, we'll have guests in every day, and the oportunity to carve out a chunk of time to dive into writing or promotion will be gone. If I want to get Choice published this year, I need to have it finished in the next two weeks.

Credit: Ronnie Nijmeh, http://www.ProductCreatorPro.com
So while I corrected copy and created front and back matter, I emailed my cover designer with concepts and ideas. A shout out to cover artist Todd Hebertson, who has created the covers of all three of my books and works so fast it astounds me. Here in the age of the Internet, all communication and designs are exchanged via email. Todd is responsive and creative and always willing to make changes and adjustments, big or small. We went through about a dozen drafts before deciding on the one at the top of the page. 

 Book covers matter. As any author can attest, you want to be proud of your book cover, and you want it to attract attention for all the right reasons. When my first book, A Butler's Life, came out in hardcover, it had the most dreadful cover and I hated it. (See it here.) We changed it when it went to paperback (check it out here) and I will always be glad. It is so much more descriptive of Chris's life as a butler than the esoteric, black and white hardcover design, which looks like it could have been a photo of the dressing table of crusty Mr. Carson of Downton Abbey. As research shows, readers really DO judge a book by its cover.

 So, what do YOU think? Would the cover design and cover copy for Choice intrigue you enough to buy the book? 

 Many thanks in advance for the input and support!

Comments

  1. HartApril 3, 2014 at 10:32 AM

    I love the cover, Kim. Perfect for the title and the story. I find the back cover copy a bit long. It's almost like it's a synopsis. Instead of enticing us (which you do accomplish in your last paragraph), you seem to be telling us half the story. Don't tell us Keith is gay; tell us he has secret that he must admit to himself and to Jody. I'd combine paragraphs 1 & 2, cut that paragraph. Then end with the paragraph 3 combined with the last part of paragraph 4 that begins with "Jody faces an ultimatum..." With appropriate transition, of course. IMHO. Just thinks it's too long for a back cover.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making the leap

Image
Offer accepted. We are in contract. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows us that we found a property that can be a project. Built in 1900, extensively renovated and updated in in the mid-80s, while keeping and enhancing the original details (beautiful woodwork, floors), the house is 2600 square feet on an acre and a half, with 250' feet of waterfront on a large pond fed by a river.  The house is set up with a small apartment which has its own entrance (exterior spiral staircase) which we envisage renovating so that we have both a guest room with bathroom and the apartment. Perhaps, down the line, we'll need the apartment should one of us require live-in care. In the nearer future, perhaps we'll (gasp!) Airbnb it. Under the previous owners it also operated as a garden center, and there are greenhouses, hoop houses, and a raised vegetable bed on the property. And -- be still, Chris's beating heart-- there's a barn with a workshop, an office (origina...
Read more

Transitions

Image
I write from a rental cottage in Connecticut that Chris and I took for the month of December. I've k ept the news on the down-low primarily because I don't want to tempt Fate, but we have sold the bed and breakfast, and are retiring from innkeeping. We are scheduled to close at the end of next week --the closing was delayed two weeks, resulting in more hesitation in sharing the news. Once the closing has  taken place and I know it's a done deal, then I would feel more comfor table in announcing it  I studied psychology in college because I was fascinated by how people were wired, how they thought,  what made them do what they did. Specifically, I was obsessed with why I did/thought/felt what I did, and what it meant.  Early on, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (result: ENFT [Extrovert/Intuitive/Feeling/Judging]) and there was a question that has returned to me thousands of times since I first encountered it:  " Do you prefer things settled and decided, o...
Read more

Remembering the Sacto Dixieland Jazz Jubilee on National Jazz Day

Image
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Dixieland jazz was my childhood soundtrack. First, the LP records (they didn’t call them Long Playing for nothing) on the Hi-Fi stereo console: Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, the haunting soprano sax of Sidney Bechet, the seemingly improvisational, but actually well-polished lively sounds of the Firehouse Five + 2, who we could occasionally enjoy live at Disneyland as many of the members of the band were animators, illustrators, and members of Disney studios. There was“Strictly From Dixie,” Benson Curtis’s radio program of trad (traditional) jazz every Saturday at 5 PM, recorded on Dad’s Teac reel-to-reel and played back endlessly over the backyard speakers while we swam in the pool and Dad pruned the palm trees or barbecued the chicken. My parents were charter members of Orange County’s Jazz Inc. jazz club, which hosted a meeting/performance on the second Sunday of each month at a local Moose lodge. From time to time, we kid...
Read more