All About Covers

 

I've always been interested in art. As I was writing my first book in 2015, I drew some basic pictures of my characters... (That's Sienna, Keita, Carli and Zuri from Keita's Wings, by the way).  So I decided to try designing my own cover when I began looking at publishing my first book. Cringe with me, please.

Yikes! Thankfully my publishing people insisted on going to a professional. The cover I paid for was much better looking than my attempts. However, I'm not sure that their professional was up on his YA fantasy. It's a beautiful cover, but doesn't quite reflect the genre. One of the great things about being an indie author, though, is that I can expiriment and change things over time. I used this cover as a rough template for the others in the series. Later I figured out how to add things to make it look more fantastic. Luckily I had all the rights to this cover, so I could legally play with it as needed. Here's what I have now:

Conventional wisdom says that you should never design your own covers unless you are a professional graphic designer. But I'm a stubborn independant author for a reason. I've been making all of my own covers ever since, and learning as I went. Until now. Recently, I bit the bullet and hired an expert to redo the DreamRovers trilogy covers. I have to admit that the new ones are beautiful. Here's the before and after. Reply to this email or contact me on social media (TheSpectraBooks on most sites) and let me know what you think!