Monday Check In

Last week...

Writing Related: Still working on revisions and edits for Mississippi's story. I'm hoping to have them finished by September 1st so I can send them back to my beta readers and editor to have them give the changes a once over. 

Motivational Quote: "Action is what separates the doers from the dreamers." ~ Lennox Lewis

What I'm Reading: I finished the book I was reading last night so I'll most likely start a new one tonight. We went to the library last Friday afternoon so I'll need to decide which of the books I borrowed to read first.

Random Things: I'm considering having the covers of Honor Bound and Promises to Keep redone. I'm looking at different companies/cover artists but haven't settled on one yet. If you know of a good cover artist that is reasonably priced, feel free to reach out to me at Katherineg425@yahoo.com. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Random Photo:

                                           Mrs Green checking on her brother.
 

Monday Check In

Last week...

Writing Related:  I asked my cover artist to redo the cover for Honor Bound, the first book in my Echo Company series. She did minor tweaking, but I like it better than the previous cover. I'll be changing it out at the same time that Ivan's story, Broken Trust, is released in a couple of weeks or so. I'll put the revised cover down below under my Random Photo section so you can check it out. Let me know what you think.

Motivational Quote: "If you keep working, keep striving, and try always to move forward a little bit with every job you do, you'll eventually make it." ~ Cass Elliot

What I'm Reading: I'm reading Out of the Clear Blue Sky by Kristan Higgins. I should finish it tonight.

Random Things:  School starts next week here in upstate NY. I always feel like it's a good time for a fresh start so I'm taking this week to look over my goals, personal and writing related, and seeing where I stand at this point in the year. I know I'm behind in a couple of areas so I'm going to try and set up some new processes to get me back on track. 

Random Photo:

                     Here's the new cover of Honor Bound that I mentioned above.
  

Monday Check In

Last week...

Writing Related: I've started working again on the revisions for Ivan's story. I need to get this book finished. I've divided the manuscript into thirds and am trying to get 1/3 done each week. I moved some scenes around and deleted others so that the story's time line flows better.

Motivational Quote: "Every morning I wake up...I ask myself to give myself the best chance at having a good day. ~ Alexi Pappas

What I'm Reading: I started reading The Christmas Wedding Guest by Susan Mallery on Friday. It's the first book in the Wishing Tree series. 

Random Things:  Not so random really. While Ivan's story isn't ready for publication yet, I do have the cover. It was created by the talented Alison Henderson. The cover photo is below. I hope you like it as much as I do.

 

Male Models, Female Models, and Backgrounds, Oh My

I had originally planned on writing a post on my goals for 2020 now that I have them set and steps set up to track and achieve them. That changed when I spoke with someone about designing covers for ebooks. She is designing the cover for the first book in my upcoming series. I hope to have it ready for release in Mid-February so I've spent the last few days searching for cover art.

This is the first book I'll be self-publishing so I spent a lot of time reading various terms of use documents.  I've also learned a lot about commercial versus standard use versus editorial use only and about credit and copyright attribution requirements.

I've never really looked at images of male and female models, background images, fonts, and the like. I discovered it's easy to get lost in the rabbit hole of available images and related websites. I thought it would be a snap to find a couple that personified my characters, but not so much. Not because I couldn't find that "perfect" couple, but because I found more images than I could probably ever use. It was hard to settle on just one to send to the person designing the cover. In the end, I sent her images of two couples and asked her to use which one she found easier to work with.

I hope to share the cover with you in a few weeks.

Do You Judge A Book By Its Cover?

This weekend I took a poll asking, "How criteria do you use when deciding whether or not to read a book by an author new to you?"  I will admit this was a very informal and spur of the moment poll consisting of my two sisters, mother, and a few friends totaling 7 people all together. All of them are avid readers, reading an average of 8 books a month. We all refer books to each other and are always looking for "new to us" authors.

Here are the questions I asked and the average responses:

1. Do you decide to read a book based on the back cover blurb? - 7 out the 7 said yes. (I agreed.)
2. Does the title influence your decision? - Nearly everyone said No. (I agreed). One person said only if it was completely ridiculous or over the top.
3. Do review quotes by best-selling authors printed on the cover influence your decision? - 3 out of the 7 said yes. (I disagreed). One person said no because she knew of two best-selling authors who were friends and had seen review quotes by the authors on each other's books so she felt those types of endorsements are deceiving. (Personally, I couldn't help thinking what are friends for. LOL)
4. Does the excerpt on the inside of the book before the title page influence your decision? - 5 out of the 7 people said sometimes or yes. (I agreed.) One person said she never reads them. 
5. Does the cover art influence your decision in any way? - 5 out of the 7 said yes. One person said if the title was catchy and the back cover blurb sounded interesting, she would still give it a try even if it had what she thought was a bad cover. Another said if the cover looked too racy, had anything vampire, werewolf, or witch related on it, she would pass it by. (Yes, this was my 70-something mother.) I agreed with the majority. If the cover art looks like something my eleven year old nephew could put together in Paint, then it makes me wonder what type of editing was done and how well the story was written. Of course being an author myself, I know that in most cases authors have very little say over the cover art so I try not to be too judgmental.

What criteria do you use when deciding whether or not to pick up that book by a new to you author?