Here is the first of the concepts I asked my designer to work up. There are a number of things about this that appeal to me, including the simplicity, ability to have text on the phone screen, uniformity of style with The Raven Sound, and the fact I can see it working as a thumbnail and cover. It is also easily scaleable, which was an issue I had with my previous cover. On that occasion I hadn’t considered the dimensions of the paperback I might use, compared to the thumbnail needed for Amazon, and ended up in an unexpected situation where height and width might have to change, which was an initial problem with a centred photograph. Those wonderful folks at Blush fixed it for me of course, but it was one of those little things it’s easy to miss if you’re controlling the whole process yourself.
Though I like elements, the colour scheme doesn’t work for me (and I want to avoid pink), I’ve deiced I don’t want the subtitle on the phone screen, and I’m quite keen on the actual photo version of the phone from my rejected concepts. So I’ve asked if we can develop this one, but try a few alternatives to address my reservations.
Second approved concept here. I love the simplicity, keeping my branding on the name but in a Nokia font, being able to highlight the punctuation emoticons (which if you recall I’d flagged in my initial pitch to the designer), and there’s no mistaking the title. The emoticons have a great symmetry too, which appeals to my OCD tendencies, and the one in the middle happens to be very important to the plot (you’ll have to read the book to see what it means). Elements I’m less keen on are the colour scheme and realistically ‘Nokia’ style, which I worry might not be recognisable to sections of my potential audience. There were a couple of other variations on this, with hearts around or either side of the title, but while it’s a romantic novel, I don’t want that to be too blatant, and it isn’t what I’d call a ‘romance’ novel so I don’t want to be misleading. So we’ll look at options for this too.
With the permission of the designer, I also shared the concepts with some key people who had read my draft, to get their views on what fitted best. This time I got quite an array of different preferences, but (aside from the pink) no-one had negative things to say about these two. So here we go.
Next stage update in a week of so.
Stay safe, Kit