Starting Small, Dreaming Big
I’m giving away an abridged sample chapter of my new Paranormal Romance, Marrying A Monster, on Instafreebie, right now. This is the second-to-last day of the giveaway, so grab it while you can. Just click here, and if you are not already an Instafreebie member, go through the steps to sign up.
MV Covers* is run by an artist who is stepping back from the world of premade book covers (where the author picks out a pre-created design, explains what text needs to go on it, and pays for the result) to focus on logo work. Due to this, she is listing all her remaining premades at $15 a piece (which is EXTREMELY inexpensive for the quality of work she does) and is willing to make fairly major changes for a fee. I found a cover that I liked (for Loving A Deathseer, Book 3 in the Jaiya Series), but the woman was showing a bit more cleavage than I felt comfortable with, and I wanted her eyes to be more visible. The final pricetag for having that done and the fonts changed to more or less match what you see on the ebook cover to Marrying A Monster, was $30.
*Note: like many book cover sites, may be NSFW depending on your office’s guidelines.
Let me introduce you to Rina, the heroine of Marrying A Monster. She has one of those super-efficient metabolisms we all envy, and the kind of long, wavy hair I personally envy, even though I know how much work that can be. Her first weapon of choice is her pepper spray, though she doesn’t like to use it in places where it would hit innocent bystanders.
At the beginning of the story, Rina’s clothing shop is losing money, and her chief financial backers (her parents) can’t help her out unless she does them a favor…which will involve her traveling back to their hometown of Thundermouth, near the top of Mount Snarl in the Blue Smoke Mountains.
Along the way, she visits such prime vacation spots as Goatsfart and Stayout, meets a hunky but secretive folklore expert by the name of Vipin, and bickers with her archnemesis and least favorite customer, Amita. But there is a monster stalking her up the mountain, and it will take more than snark and pepper spray to take it down….
One of my hobbies while I was working on Marrying A Monster was trying to make my own cover art. This produced a bunch of dubious results and two or three that were decent but not appropriate to my genre.
Then I went looking through premades. There are a lot of very talented designers who make premades available at reasonable prices, but a couple of things made my search more difficult.
One, my books are not steamy. The thing to remember about the “bare torso” style of cover art is that the author (and/or publisher) is usually being very honest in advertising the contents of the book. It attracts people who like that kind of content, and tells people who don’t like it to keep on moving. If I gave Marrying A Monster that kind of cover, it would be false advertising, which is a good way to annoy your potential buyers.
Two, the setting is a fictional country called Jaiya, “in a world not quite like ours.” Jaiya has elements of several cultures, including a religion very loosely inspired by Christianity, but the climate, ethnic groups, and parts of the country’s history are inspired by India, Pakistan, and the other countries in that area.
There are several places where I describe people as having gold or bronze or tea-colored skin…which meant that any piece of cover art with blonde or red-haired, fair-skinned people was automatically a no-go. I also describe the characters as mostly wearing modern clothes and talking on cell phones, so the handful of “Exotic India” covers I ran across didn’t seem to fit either.
I eventually decided that since people in that part of the real world come in a huge variety of ethnicities, it was okay to look at artwork where the characters could maybe pass for Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, or where the stock photos involved had been manipulated so thoroughly that trying to judge the character’s ethnicity seemed pointless.
Then I fell in love with a particular premade at Rocking Book Covers and contacted Adrijus, the designer who runs the site. He was happy to make the font changes I asked for, and just submitted the final version to me today.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very pleased to present to you, the cover art for Marrying A Monster!
*puts on Tia Baden hat*
My short story collection “The Pomegranate Lover and Other Stories” is almost ready to go live. I’ve ordered a proof copy of the paperback version from Createspace, and if I can live with what I did to the cover on that version, I will approve the print version and upload the mobi version to Amazon. In the meantime, here is the cover art for the ebook.
Jaglion Press