So I reworked my series pages today and how they worked with my theme. I want to do more, but alas! I haven't solved PHP coding yet. In the meantime, every post in a series now displays the series icon, which was formerly relegated to the sidebar. Wait a second. Hold that thought. It what?!
Not all of my series icons made awesome book covers, to put it mildly, and the icon for The Creative Life was certainly not going to cut it as a book cover.
Designing a new cover is fraught with false starts, preconceptions, and the reality of the stock photography you can afford. I decided I wanted to riff off the theme begun with the original flash fiction piece, but that the old cover was not going to cut it for a new fleshed-out serial.
The idea here is to have each storyworld recognizable for what it is, but also to have each collection look different than an individual short story.
So Pearl Wise's covers needed an update from the time I got started, and I knew it. With the advent of Radiance approaching, I decided to just go ahead and try and here they are, in gallery:
So I was actually trying to design a cover for the collection, Gone Hunting, but I ended up with this: a newly branded, much more professional potential cover for "Crossing the Barrier."
I think it appeals more to a younger audience than I was going for, but considering the age of the protagonist, that might not be a bad thing.
I am seriously considering (drafting) a Kickstarter project to help pay to get digital (and printed) editions of Soul (Breath), Radiance (Radiant Lands), and Gone Hunting (Vardin) to be gorgeous, properly covered, and properly copywritten.
And then, I actually come up with a cover I think I like. But will my audience like it?
