NEW! White Rabbit Trilogy Covers!

Hey. Smell that? It’s the smell of new shiny, brand spanking new book covers. OK, let me back up a little bit… So when I was launching the White Rabbit Trilogy, I did everything (except the editing … and even then I was tempted) myself. (I can be a tad control freakish. OK … a lot control freakish. I know this about myself.) Everything included designing the covers. I did have a bit of a design background and I was pretty confident I could make the covers look fairly decent, or at the very least not butt ugly and completely amateurish. Here’s what they looked like before.

Not too too bad right? But I did decide that as my author career went on, my first major upgrade would be getting someone to design my covers for me. And I really was set to do just that because everything I’d read said you shouldn’t do your covers yourself.

But look, I’ve never been one to color inside the lines or always do what everyone else was doing.

Plus, I learned early to rely on my own talents, and that even if I didn’t have the particular skill I needed at the moment, I could develop it. I’ve taught myself languages, instruments, taught myself how to knit and crochet, taught myself how to cook and bake, even taught myself to draw (still struggling with that one but making progress).

So book covers? Yeah, I could do that.

I decided that before I launched anything else I wanted to first do these covers over and relaunch them. For one they definitely don’t look like they’re part of a series. Not even remotely. Secondly, they don’t necessarily look like thrillers. Those were two major things I wanted to remedy.

The main reason I didn’t go with someone else is because I wanted control (there goes that word again) of all the creative to use for promo images etc.

So I did what I always do when I need to learn something new. I read some books. Reading is effing fundamental.

After reading the books, I spent a ton of time searching for and narrowing down images. I needed images that weren’t just unique and evocative but also looked good next to one another. I looked at best-selling covers in the genre and saved ones that were effective but not complicated and seemed like they would easy to make my own version of.

Once images were chosen, I played around with various effects and edits before adding the text and trying out different fonts and placements.

After endless iterations and tweaking, I was satsfied with how all the covers looked side by side. Then I sent them off to a few people in my inner circle for feedback, which was good across the board.

For the final test, I looked at my new covers alongside the covers I downloaded to see if they blended in and the quality was comparable.

So here’s what they look like now.