The Cover Counts!

I'm so excited!

Most of you reading this know that I've been pretty proud of the learning curve I've beaten down in regards to making my own covers for the books.  What started as a pretty pitiful attempt has, I think, gotten better and better, to the point where the cover for Prophecy had some people oohing and ahhing at RavenCon.  And so, I was happy.

Prophecy has been well reviewed, too--three of the four reviews to date come from the pros, bloggers who just review books.  4.5 bits of happiness out of 5 ain't bad, then.

So why, then, wasn't it selling?

One of the things I remember learning from my marketing class in the MBA program was that if stuff isn't working--well, change it.  Do something.  So I started looking, and kept hanging back on where one of the reviewers had called my cover "confusing."

Huh?  Confusing?  Hey, I didn't count, but I'm pretty sure I spent well over 100 hours on it.  I'm not confused.  Still, I wondered what that could mean, so I went to my friends on Facebook for their wisdom, and learned that the reviewer was right.  The cover was confusing.  My daughter, beautiful artist that she is, focuses on anime style, and so the cover suggested an anime type of story rather than the coming-of-age story set in a mystical land of elves that it is.

Oh--yeah--blinding flash of the obvious--I sees it now.

So I redesigned it quickly, working with just the graphic of an object that is central to the story, and it still didn't take off.

*sigh*

Enter my friend, Renee Barratt, of TheCoverCounts.com.  Once I'd finally admitted that I couldn't make a

cover good enough to wrap around the awesome story inside the book, I asked her for help.  She stepped up in a big way, I think, and I'm excited to brag that today the new cover stands proudly on the "shelf" of Amazon.com, looking for you to purchase it!

Click on the link below the cover image to go see it.  Oh, and as a special thankfulness kinda thing, it being that week and all, I'm lowering the price to just $0.99--less than the cost of a soda.  But you have to be quick, as Amazon will only let me do that for a short period of time.

Get the book at Amazon.com

Enjoy!

- TOSK