Cover Girl

Before I get it into the hands of beta readers I have to do packaging. That includes things like interior graphics, cover, description...

First snag. When I started writing the come-on for the Amazon page, my first thought is I didn't have a lot to come on with. There's no big stakes, there's no clear antagonist...

Oh, but then I realized the book I'd written was not the book I outlined. When I outlined, I wanted the diary as part of the mosaic. Well, turns out it is the heart. This is a mystery story, but it isn't about the coins or the guns, it is about Linnet's lost love.

So I've several pages of scribbles on that and no editing done and I still have to do the scene dividers and the cover and...

You know, that's a really boring cover. A trowel? What, is this a gardening handbook?

There's nothing in the cover that says romance. Or London. The only thing it manages to say is "underground." And that's if the art works and after another search through Shutterstock and a purchase of yet more 3D software I'm not much ahead there and not looking forward to the work and maybe I've got the wrong idea all along.

Back to revisit the idea of putting the human in the picture. This isn't so much a mystery or a travel story as it is Penny's story. Like the last. Like all of them. So shouldn't I put a face on the cover?

Research time!

And, well.

With some new search fields I turned up a bunch of quirky female protagonist having adventures with an archaeological bent. And they're basically cozies.

But this is weird. Whereas a cozy set in a New England fishing village or set in 1920's Rochester has the typical cozy cover -- painted or hand-drawn, quirky, and no human figure -- the ones that are set around a dig in Egypt or something Maya or whatever have...artifact covers! (Most of them. There's up to a quarter -- from this completely ad hoc survey -- that have the quirky hand-drawn stuff).

Yeah, we're back to artifact covers. The samples I found lean cozy in that they tend to be a fully-lit artifact posed as if in a cabinet of curiosities; the thriller types (typically with an ex-SEAL with a ridiculously macho name as hero) have lots of Fog of Mystery, or for bonus points, fire around the object de jour.

And why am I tempted to write the Private Skippy series now? 

So I'm back to artifacts despite nothing coming to mind for the London one. Maybe I should bit the bullet and write to Transport for London? Naw. Even if they'd let me use the roundel, the price would be too dear.

I don't even feel like arting right now. And I'm too burned out to do editing. Something about this series destroyed my confidence in a way that writing military SF/horror doesn't (or I hope it doesn't).

And just to add to my work list: the whole reason to kick out another Athena Fox story -- and, yes, a third, as fast as I can write it -- is because multiple books multiply. Which means I really want to go back and do some clean-up on the FIRST book before I'm ready to push the "Publish" button on this one!

And so I'm right now doing test renders seeing if I can clean up some of the things I don't like about the first cover, while also taking another look at just paying someone -- because while I'm bad at a lot of things, typography is something I'm really wretched at and I can tell how amateurish the thing looks at present...