I’ve become more aware of the importance of covers. I like mine to have a connection to an important scene in the book. Keeping this in mind and doing some research by looking at covers by authors I enjoy reading who write in the same genre as I and checking out the suggestions of those better informed that I am, I have updated three of my covers this year. The first that I tackled was book 1 in the Students of Jump time travel series.
My first book’s cover has three destinct evolutions.
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| Evo #1 |
Cover number 1: I thought this would be good because it has a representation of the nerg box and the meadow where it first appears. Now it looks very old school and not eye catching.
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| Evo #2 |
The second one shows two important scenes: the meadow where the time traveler arrives and the winter scene where a crucial event took place. Brent is living two lives, so a split cover seemed appropriate. I was also trying to brand my series with the title fonts and the bottom color pop behind the author name. It’s not bad.
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| Evo #3 |
Here is the current cover. This is an initial scene in the book and one that gets revisited at the end. The vagueness of the time traveler is both representative of the process of arrival and the ambivalence Brent feels about how to live his life. This one catches the eye. And most importantly, it has been selling itself, which tells me it is a good match to the story.
I haven’t touched the branding, but my covers for the other books in the series are starting to drift away from it, and I will have to make adjustments to this cover to fit the changes.
