Book Cover Madness

People ask me at least once a month if it’s hard to write a book. My answer.  It’s not the writing that makes me slide into late-night panic attacks.

Oh no. The MOST stressful part of creating a novel???  The Book Cover Design.

A  cover has a boatload of work to do. It needs to set the mood, draw a reader in, show a story.

When it doesn’t do that….when that picture ain’t  properly tellin’ your thousands of words…. the wrong cover feels like you are stomping all over your awesomeness. All those beautiful sentences you so carefully crafted suddenly seem meaningless.

And then, if you are a tiny bit anxious like me, you start to worry that one or two unusable cover design attempts means you will never get your book cover right. Your entire story is ruined. The whole endeavor has been a gigantic, horrific, waste-of-time catastrophe. CASTASTROPHE!!!!

But THEN, you call your writing bestie and she reminds you we’ve been down this gravely train track before. It will work out. She tells you to breathe into a brown paper bag  – USELESS. She switches tactics and gives you some guidance. You realize you got your vision all backwards  and you conceptualize a clearer, more brilliant cover design.

So you email your talented cover artist with all your magnificent new ideas.  And then you wait. And wait. And wait a little more. And try not to obsess.

But you do obsess. Because, really, how can you not obsess?

In the meantime…you know one thing is for sure –  these are the covers you will most definitely NOT be using.