Refreshed Book Covers!
Whelp, it only took six months, but I FINALLY got my letter from the US Library of Congress Copyright Office officially registering the artwork of my refreshed book covers! Whoo-hoo! Thank you Karen Phillips for doing such a superb job making the changes I've desperately wanted done for years now. You. Are. Awesome!
As you can see, Karen even had to resize the book covers a bit to the proper publishing size since my old traditional publisher's artist didn't do it correctly. Let's just say, working with them on book three, Sanctuary of Fire, had turned into a nightmare by that point. I won't even get into the editing fiasco right now. It was such a struggle, start to finish; a foreshadowing of their downfall in hindsight.
Their artist kept trying to make my main character on that cover a washed out, ex-biker, 40-something, blonde Filipino. Um,nooooooo! Not even close to what I had asked for. Ultimately, their incompetence was stalling the release, so after many months of back and forth, I settled on the girl that was on that old cover. I never was very happy about it and never felt she "was the character."
Since the publishing house closed in January 2017, and I owned all the copyrights to the artwork too, I went ahead and had the changes made to the covers that I've always wanted made. I even had the cute fella on the cover of book two, Broken Seed, revised to actually look like the image I've had in my imagination since the start. This sneaky devil of a man was described in the book as "a mix of Greek god meets Latin lover." The other artist never could get him right either, so for that one, I settled on a Caucasian looking man with the right kind of coy smile. It was as close as I could get them without delaying the release date then too. And I had just prayed that the blue tent to the cover would make it work well enough.
The cover of book one, The Deceiver, had always hit the mark about 95%. I really loved it actually. However, when I decided to refresh these covers, I realized I needed to make the snake striking out, not passive like it was. After all, the snake represents the bringer of darkness, evil, pain and hurt - Satan. He is always out to destroy us and strikes as often as he can. Changing the snake to a striking figure felt right.
Now, for your viewing pleasure; here are the old book covers and the new book covers for comparison.
Please, tell me what you think!
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