The challenges of choosing an awesome book cover.

How my book cover design process went from fun to frustrating.

I heard all of the gurus screaming, “Get the best book cover you can!”

“It takes readers about 6 seconds to make a decision to buy a book based on your cover.”

It continued. “You need to get it right. A book cover is everything!”

“Your book could be amazing, but if they can’t get past the cover, they will never read your book.”

Thanks. No pressure at all.

From all that, my new quote emerged.

“Never judge a book by its cover, unless you’re trying to sell a book.”

This is what you start off with. A blank slate.

You have to try and explain exactly what you want but no one thinks like you or has your vision.

Everyone keeps saying it doesn’t matter what YOU want, it matters how the reader emotionally connects to your cover. I get that.

As an indy author, you need to get your own book cover.

No one will do it for you.

You have to choose a design, create a concept, and decide how one image represents your entire book. It needs to look professional and it needs to match the genre you’re writing.

You also have to trust others to “see” your vision.

The cover needs to delight the reader and look good in a black and white thumbnail because most readers are reading on an iPad or Kindle.

So the first part of my book cover challenge was creating a simple mock-up that I could use for inspiration as I wrote the book. It’s an idea one of my mentors talked about, and it’s very effective.

It worked! Besides, as a “squirrel-chasing creative” I need the focus.

This was the first cover.

I am not sure what this is. Some kind of weird kinky cat thing?

ignore the name, I was playing around with pen names

Does that scream murder mystery to you?

The only thing that screams is to kill this cover. Not the cats, just the cover.

One more thing? Do you see Gabby in that image? I didn’t think so and neither did she.

Since I had so much time on my hands. NOT. I decided to make my own cover. This is a no-no in the publishing world and I know that. Something you learn early on when you start looking at book covers.

I decided to make a mock-up cover, one for inspiration only.

Do you see how the series’ name changes? Yup, that’s part of the process too. The pen name changes a few times as well.

These are the three I worked on. The one with the big blood spot was a favorite, everyone liked it. Tells you about the people I hang out with.

To me, it looked like blood was splattered on the wall not on the floor like I wanted.

So then I went back to the original idea, except I put a cat hovering behind the black cat. The maroon one below was on the webpage for a while as a placeholder until I got the new cover.

I knew it would change but I still liked the inspiration it gave me.

I did not care for the background, it looked nothing like the cafe and it was too busy. Plus, Gabby was not impressed.

She kept wondering if the cat behind “her” was going to stab her with the readily available knife in the image.

She also took the time to remind me she was a tuxedo cat, not a black cat. Constantly remind me.

The professional covers

I finally got a professional book cover designer with an image of Gabby on the front cover. Cute little round face with a somewhat less creep stalker cat hovering behind her.

We also got a bloody mess under the cat in the background.

My friend told me it looked like the cat had her period. Disturbing because it was a male cat.

Back to the drawing board!

Finally, we got a cover both Gabby and I could agree on. She likes it because she is the main focus of the whole cover.

But the cover made us both nauseous. It also made Gabby look pale which is unacceptable.

Finally, we got the cover we both liked.

The cover is much brighter. My camera sucks.

Simple, professional, and to the point. You can tell by the cover it’s a murder mystery.

After some time, Gabby figured it would be ok for Trunk to be in the background and she did approve of his bloody paw prints. Sharing is not her strong suit, so I am proud of her.

But that is not all.

There is one more cover…

Before this one, we requested one more professional cover. This cover designer heard “talking cats” and immediately made it a weird cozy mystery cover.

Talk about missing our vision completely.

Gabby shares her thoughts on this cover in her Gabby Bits blog post which will come out next week.