What's In A Cover

By: Terry Odell

Congratulations to "Sally", the winner in Terry's giveaway. Thank you to all who participated!

When I began writing my Blackthorne, Inc. covert ops series, the publisher didn't sign multi-book deals with new authors. When working with a publisher, they take care of all the details, providing editors and cover art. After I had my third book published with them, times had changed. They'd cut out their romance line, and I decided to go indie with book 4, Danger in Deer Ridge. This meant I had to hire out all the services normally provided by the publisher. But I'd already been working with a cover artist (The wonderful Dave Fymbo), and I asked him to design the cover for that book. These were the original covers for my Blackthorne, Inc. books. *Note: Danger in Deer Ridge's cover was NOT designed by the publisher. More on that later.

 Although I had nothing against any of the publisher-designed covers, they weren't "series" covers. Also, with the upsurge in e-books, and just plain on-line shopping for books, the challenge became designing a cover that looked good in a thumbnail-sized image, since browsing brick-and-mortar bookstores was becoming harder and harder to do.

When I got the rights to publish my e-books, I had my artist create covers that looked as much like the original cover art as possible. I didn't want to confuse readers into thinking these were new books. I kept the identical cover for When Danger Calls, but didn't have permission to use the same cover for Where Danger Hides (unless I wanted to pay big bucks!) So, this is where we went with that book. (It was also voted best Romantic Suspense of 2012 in the HOLT Medallion contest, and I wanted to feature that award on the cover.)

However, as time went on, I realized that it was more important to let readers know these books belonged together. When the rights to Rooted in Danger reverted to me, I had my cover artist come up with an entirely different cover for the e-book, and using the fonts for my name and the title, connected it to Danger in Deer Ridge.

Now I had two covers that "matched" and said "This is a series," but I still had two odd men out. It was easy enough to keep the art and simply change the words on the cover, so I decided to ask my cover artist to do that for me on the first two books. The results?   

 Now, there's a "series" feel to the books. I think it works. What about you? Do you like looking at a book and immediately knowing where it "fits?"

And, keep an eye out for Book 5 in my Blackthorne, Inc. series, which is currently with my editor. I'll be asking Dave Fymbo to design the cover for the new one, too.

Giveaway:

Terry will be giving away a digital copy of Danger In Deer Ridge to one person leaving a comment or email entry.

Giveaway ends 11:59pm EST Aug. 10th. Please supply your email in the post. You may use spaces or full text for security. (ex. jsmith at gmail dot com) If you do not wish to supply your email, or have trouble posting, please email maureen@JustRomanticSuspense.com with a subject title of JRS GIVEAWAY to be entered in the current giveaway.