This is the placeholder ‘cover’ I’ve had on my website for Too Clever by Half. This week, I can upload the real one!

I’ve been away from home and offline for the past several days, so I just caught up on the cover craze that took over 8LW this past week. That’s very fortuitous, as I now have a cover of my very own to share!

I wish I could say I had the designing chops (and confidence) of Justine, the whimsical eye of Michaeline, or the cover-judging savvy of Kay. Let’s just say I’m not one of those people who judges or buys a book by its cover. I had high hopes that I’d be able to have a quick conversation with a designer, turn the task over to her, and do a happy dance when the best cover I could ever imagine appeared in my inbox. (I can’t help that I sometimes live in fantasy land. Hazard of the fiction writing profession.)

So, when no cover fairies appeared to do my bidding for me, I began my long, arduous journey toward a cover for my soon-to-be-released (!) novella myself. I allocated a mid-level budget for the project, narrowed down the list of well-established and recommended romance cover designers in that price range, and finally chose The One. It didn’t work out. So I spent more months researching, returning to my original down-selected list, and contacting designers for scheduling information. I chose the second One. That almost crashed and burned as well. But the second time, I at least got a proof copy to consider.

The first thing I noticed about the proof copy was color. So much color. You might recall I was traveling in September, which is when the color bomb hit my inbox. I opened the email attachment in the middle of the night Copenhagen time, gasped, blinked hard, said something like ‘dear lord, that’s pink’ (possibly with a few expletives thrown in), and went back to bed for a nearly sleepless night.

Nevertheless, I persisted. From the ashes, and through some teeth-clenching emails and what felt like never-ending negotiations, a cover that started out as unworkable gradually became something usable, maybe even pretty. I’ll let you be the judge:

There are a lot of things I like about this cover. It definitely identifies the genre – in this case, historical romance – even in thumbnail size. For an e-book, this is arguably a cover’s most important function. I finally like the look of the fonts after going through a few style and size iterations. The images capture elements of my story, like the journal where my heroine records quotes from her favorite thinkers and scholars, and the flowering trees that say springtime. Even the pink dress has grown on me.

Other plusses: the hair color matches that of my heroine, a pink dress is something the heroine wears (and the hero quite likes) during a pivotal scene, the gloves hide a plethora of sins (you don’t want to know), and all the words are now spelled correctly. Ahem.

And so you can see the back cover with its pretty damask-patterned background and read the cover copy I finally chose, here’s the print edition cover, with spine and back:

I’ll be revealing my cover and back cover copy over on my Facebook author page this week (you got to see it first here on the blog!), as well as answering a question a day about the series and the novella. I’ll also be uploading my very pink cover to my author website, and providing an excerpt of the first chapter there. And everywhere my pink cover and I go, I’ll provide a link to sign up for my newsletter, like this one, which will get you a longer excerpt, plus behind-the-scenes information about this series-launching novella and the next two full-length novels!