Redesign

I just finished publishing my first novel, Sunny. When I was working on getting it ready, I did things my usual way, creating my own cover for the book, but I just wasn't sure what was best. I had a couple of options that I couldn't decide between. 

So, I asked Rish. He gave me his opinion, but it didn't satisfy me. I asked my daughter, who is the one who created the fairy picture for me in the first place, what she preferred. Well...she sat down at the computer and took over.

She thought it would be better if the background had a kind of gradient, and if the font was different, and if the title and the picture were embossed, and so on and so on. In no time, it was quite different. This was the final version.

Just the comparison of the two yellow backgrounds is enough to make me think, what the hell have I been doing all this time? I have no sense of design whatsoever.

I at least have enough of a sense of design to know that the new image is vastly superior to the old one I'd done. It got me wondering what my daughter could do if she took a look at my old covers for books that were already out. I thought Christmas Creatures was the most likely suspect. Here's what it looked like right now:

She went right to work again, and smoke started rising off the CPU as it tried to keep up with all her changes. She never does anything halfway, and after a long time messing with it, trying several options, and abandoning some ideas, she had a cover that now looked like this:

She also re-did the wraparound cover for the paperback and hardcovers for me.

Original:

And new version:

I bought an eBook about marketing self-published books, and one of the main things the author stressed was having someone professional design your covers. He harped on that over and over, bringing it up again and again across various chapters and sections. Looking at these two covers helps me to understand exactly what he was talking about. I can't afford to hire some professional to design my covers for me...but, I did sire one of those people. She seemed awfully amenable to designing covers. I guess I really need to have her sit down and do all my covers for me, it seems.