Decisions, decisions.

I was looking at my Kindle books, trying to choose what to read, and started really noticing the covers. I realized that I could pick out most of the self-published books from the trade books by the size. Not that it was a glaring difference, but it was a difference. Even though this book will never be a trade paperback, It should probably use the trade paperback trim size, which meant changing the page format on Powerpoint from the standard to a 8 by 5.25 layout.

I also decided that the cover really didn’t pop enough. I love the gray and the subtlety, but subtlety is not necessarily the most compelling selling factor. So I spent a half hour or so tweaking. I’m not sure I feel like it’s an improvement though. It’s brighter, but less balanced. I think I might need to start playing with the typography again. I did change the colors and move my name down to the power-corner. But I think I’ll post it for a while and see how I feel about it after I’ve been looking at it for several days.

I posted the first chapter for critiques at Critique Circle and that’s been fascinating. It’s fun to find out what changes other people would make. I was an editor for long enough to know that there are always words that can be changed, sentences that can be improved and so on, and that no work is ever perfect, and a lot of that feedback is quite useful. If it wasn’t going to take months and months, it might be fun to go through this process on each and every chapter. But I think that’s the same level of obsessiveness that used to inspire me to spend days on a presentation that other people would pull together in a couple of hours, and I’m not sure it’s actually a sensible use of my time. Do I really want to spend years on one book when I could be writing story after story and getting better with each one instead? And phrased that way, the answer is really obvious. At least to me. So on to Sylvie! I love, love, love the scene I wrote last night.