HOW A COVER IS BORN

 By Norah Wilson (the Wilson in Wilson Doherty)

 I am in the process of putting some of my older romance stories (written solo under my real name, Norah Wilson) up on Amazon for sale as Kindle publications, and on Smashwords (great site!). But before a book can go up for sale, it needs a cover. And if you have any hope of getting into the premium catalogue for the widest distribution, it has to be a professional looking cover.

So first off, I went shopping for a cover image. Actually, I have five titles that will be going up, so I picked out five images for covers, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll focus on one. The story is called GUARDING SUZANNAH. The heroine is a blonde and beautiful criminal defense attorney who is the bane of the local police department (they call her She-Rex for her habit of shredding cops in the witness box) and who is currently being stalked. The hero is a police detective who’s determined to protect her no matter how detrimental it might be to his career. I found this picture that I thought really evoked Suzannah’s classiness (she’s a Chief Justice’s daughter) and relative innocence. The guy doesn’t look exactly as I imagined Det. John Quigley (Quigg), but I was sold by the protective, caring embrace and those wide shoulders a gal could lean on. I also like that you can’t really see his face. I think it’s critically important for the romance reader to build her own image.

But how to transform a stock image into a cover? I was particularly worried about this one because the orientation is landscape, not portrait like my other choices. Enter Victoria Smith, graphic designer. I explained that I needed to present this in a format that looked book-like. She solved the dilemma by adding a narrow bar on top and a wider one at the bottom. And the results, in my opinion, were fantastic! Check this out:

Of course, Heather and I are breathlessly awaiting our own first cover, as soon as we can sell one of our many (fabulous!) YAs currently in our agent’s hands. But when that happens, we won’t have the same degree of control over the end result as I’ve had in self-publishing my romance titles. With a publisher, typically you fill out an art fact sheet with key details from your story, and they pretty much present you with a fait accompli. You have to have major juice to get a proposed cover changed. But you know what? Publishers know their business. They usually have a pretty good feel for what kind of covers sell. I don’t know about Heather, but I’m pretty sure I’ll love whatever cover our soon-to-be-publisher comes up with for whichever of our stories sells first!