If you read my last two posts, you might reasonably expect today’s post to include the new cover for A Gift of Time. Alas, I don’t have it yet. I do, however, have the new cover for A Gift of Grace, which feels like an appropriate substitute.
I didn’t ask the designer to add freckles to Grace, but we did get all fancy with both models’ clothing. Any second now they’ll be running into a bear. And I really like their expressions.
Alas, responding to comments on the last post reminded me that the point of new covers was to expand my audience and appeal to the many, many, many book-buying romance readers in the world, and those expressions are probably all wrong for that audience. I should have made him half-naked and had both of them looking sultry. Covers like that might not have been to my personal taste (or yours!), but the point of a cover is to appeal to a specific audience and I’m not my own audience. Or at least I am my own audience, but I’m not the part of my audience that can buy enough books to let me go on eating and paying vet bills.
Oh, well. I still like their expressions.
I’ve been working on lots of marketing type things. Some of it is very fun. Much of it is not. But on the fun side has been trying out keywords to include on my book listings. “Ghost romance paranormal suspense mystery” should be a terrible set — according to Kindle Rocket, there are 6046 books found with that search. But, at least yesterday, A Gift of Ghosts was at the very top of that list, which means it’s a terrible set for some other 6000 books, but not a terrible set for my book. That was fun to discover.
Speaking of Amazon, today is Amazon Prime Day and I had $10 of Amazon money from spending $10 at Whole Foods, plus the $5 Prime Day deal on printed books, so I spent a very pleasant 45 minutes looking at all the items on my wish list and deciding what not to buy. But I finally went for Salt Fire Acid Heat, a cookbook I’ve been debating forever. I’m probably not going to carry it around in the van with me, but I’m at my brother’s so I can store it with my Christmas ornaments and scrapbooks when I drive away. And I’m excited to read it.
I’m suspecting that this week isn’t going to be a terribly productive week for me, though. I’m dog-sitting, so I’ll have three dogs to take care of, and the puppy is energetic and always trying to convince the two older dogs to play. This does not go over well with the two older dogs, so dog-sitting the puppy is a lot more like dog-sitting a toddler than it is house-sitting. But it should be fun, even if it means that I don’t finish all the many miscellaneous things that I’m working on.
For some reason, I didn’t think of Grace as a blonde. Interesting. And, I thought of Noah as wearing a green/brown/tan camo type jacket, not black leather. Funny how you get mental images of people you read about. They become real to you in so many ways.
That is funny, isn’t it? Grace is described as a blonde from the moment she appears in A Gift of Ghosts and Noah’s jacket is specified as leather in the very first chapter of Grace. But I like to keep descriptions minimal specifically so that people can let the characters be whoever they’re supposed to be. I’m always amused when people describe Maggie to me, though. Most people imagine her as Sookie from Stars Hollow and that’s not who I see at all! But most people are also completely willing to describe her, even though she never actually was onstage until… maybe Time? Maybe even Grace. But she doesn’t appear in Ghosts and yet people thought they knew what she looked like. I like that!