Progress report

I finished the new version of the cover for Book 2! I’m happy with how it turned out. Apparently when you have a really bad-ass character who is supposed to look absolutely terrifying (scars, broken nose, etc), BUT you want him to look romantic for the cover (hidden depths!), the key is: Have him close his eyes. Works wonders.

Progress report

I finished the cover for the second book today—it’s a bit of a quandary for me because I wound up with a cover that I think is very true to the couple, but it’s not a clinch. The clinch is actually kind of important in the romance genre, because it helps convey to readers the heat level of the story—a couple getting handsy/naked on the cover means that they’re doing that inside as well.

This series is fairly adult, so I feel a bit odd about this cover—the couple is being a bit weird, but nothing romantic or explicitly sexual. In a way, it works, because they are an odd couple (quite a bit stranger than the other couples in the series). I think readers will be OK as long as the rest of the book covers and the descriptions take a more-traditional approach.

Progress report

Whew! Well, I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I wasn’t expecting to be very productive today, and indeed other than a little editing, I wasn’t. But then I decided I should start trying to figure out the covers, and I hit on a cover design for the series that I really like. We’ll see how things go with the actual artwork, but I like the basic template a lot. I seen other people recommend this, but I do think that if you’re going for a specific feel for a cover, color-picking from photographs or artwork that are of the place or the period is really helpful.

Also, I used new GIMP for the first time today—it looks different from old GIMP, but it basically operates the same, so it was a pretty quick learning curve.