C didn’t quite tell me I was crazy the last time we talked about book covers. Not quite. I could tell that she wanted to, though.

See, I made a ridiculous decision last month. I’ve been waiting for a cover designer for A Lonely Magic since April. The cover on it was a great placeholder while I was posting chapters on Fictionpress and Wattpad, but it didn’t satisfy me enough as the final cover. The designer I really wanted, though, had no time until October. While I was waiting, I fell in love with another artist’s work, and decided–much too impulsively–to hire her to design a cover for ALM. As it happens, I’m pretty sure that was a mistake, and if I had realized two weeks ago that it was a mistake, it would have been a no harm, no foul situation, as if it had never happened.

As it went, however, I had a cover designer hired, an artist working on the cover I had hired her for, and so I went another direction–I asked the designer to redesign the cover for A Gift of Ghosts. The right response is, “Again? Didn’t you just do that a few months ago? What’s wrong with that cover?” The answers are, “Yes, yes, and I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose, and yet… it always felt more like a collection of weird compromises than the right cover.”

The new cover feels like the right cover.

AGiftofGhosts_print_web2

I’ve got a ton of work to do, getting new files working correctly, uploading them to all the different sites, changing all of my various marketing pages… but as I manage all that hassle, I’m feeling a nice happy glow of contentment. Beautiful, mysterious, a little spooky… it makes me want to read Ghosts again, as if I didn’t already know what it was all about.