Saturday, November 5, 2011

New Cover


Well, I decided to go with a new cover for my book. I hope you like it. Meet Jimmy Thomas, male cover model.

I thank Laura Redmond of England so much for designing the first cover I asked her to design. Everything on the cover was at my request and she did a fantastic job, but perhaps I am better at writing than knowing what should be on the cover of my books. I had a lot of feed back that the flowered heart should not be on there, that the cover looked more like a cartoon, and one reviewer's daughter asked her why Ken and Barbie with brunette hair were on the front cover.

With the reviews I have been getting and a lack of sales lately, I was wondering if part of the book that needed changing was the cover, and the other part was editing. Though my book had gone through some editors twenty years ago, perhaps it needed to go through some modern day editing. It is so easy for an indie author to edit their book again and again and again, if necessary, and that is what is so great about self-publishing -- we can take our books down and edit the heck out of them and hopefully make them better. So this week-end, I am editing Wilderness Heart with some changes recommended by editors and reviewers, especially taking out most of the adverbs. I had one person say they had a hard time reading it and would not review it because I had way too many adverbs and they were not fond of them. When did it change in writing that adverbs were not very well liked in fiction writing? When did it change that we should not put two spaces after a period? Anyway, I am from the old school of the way we were taught in school, but I am hopefully learning to change with the times and make my writing better. I can always learn as long as my brain is working and functioning properly. Without our reviewers, where would we be so I want to take the opportunity now to thank everyone who has reviewed my book and any reviewers of my work in the future.

Anyway, I hope you like the new cover and if you have't read it yet, I hope you enjoy my first work in light contemporary romantic fiction, a book to take your mind off your real world and delve into my 1970s Idaho world.