Meet Samantha Bryant today's guest author!
Take it away Samantha!
JUDGING MY OWN BOOK BY ITS COVER
Take it away Samantha!
JUDGING MY OWN BOOK BY ITS COVER
A cover is a really
important part of a book. What the cover looks like can have more to do with
whether a reader decides to pick up your book than the words on the inside or
the blurb on the back, especially when you’re a newb that no one has ever heard
of!
That's a terrifying
prospect as a writer, because, most usually (of course there are exceptions),
we don't make our own covers. In fact, depending on your path to publishing,
you, as author, might not get any say at all about what the cover looks like.
A bad cover can make the
uphill climb of finding an audience that much harder. It's like birthing a
beautiful and intelligent child, only to have someone else reject it as
worthless because your child is wearing dirty or ugly clothing. I've seen
several indie writers put out a book with a less-than-professional cover
(usually a financial decision), then re-release it with a better one and see
large changes in the kind of attention their book attracted.
My debut novel came out
with Curiosity Quills Press on April 23, 2015. (I am perhaps, maybe,
just a smidge excited about that). Curiosity Quills is a small, independent
press. My contract with them gave me input on the cover, but no right of refusal and no requirement that they actually use
my input. So, I was on tenterhooks, waiting to see what my cover would
look like.
You wanna see it?
I love it! And, boy was
that a relief!
The cover is by Polina
Sapershteyn , a graphic designer in NYC that
Curiosity Quills contracted for the work. (Here's her
website if you want to check out
some of her other work).
There are several things I
love about this cover.
First, the bright yellow is
really eye catching. When I've seen it displayed onscreen on an Amazon search
page, for example, I feel certain that anyone seeing it would at least glance
that way because of the bright yellow. The image also instantly suggests humor
and superhero, two important hints about the book on the inside of this
cover.
Second, Polina
captured a lot of revealing details about threads of
the book in this one image. The torso is thick in the waist, in a way that is
not typical of superhero comics, but is completely normal for my menopausal
characters. The costume is non-professional looking--the cape held on with a
tied ribbon and the tunic consisting of a tee-shirt looking material that
wrinkles across the breasts. That fits so well with Helen's thread in the story
(she's the one who does eventually make herself a costume)! The image used on
the center of the chest suggests gender and LGBTQ+ issues. That fits so well
with Linda/Leonel's thread.
I was utterly amazed by how
well Polina was able to represent my work, especially when you consider that
she and I have never met and only made contact online after she'd already done
my cover! There's not much there from the ideas I submitted, except
thematically. But, you know, she's a graphic artist. I'm not. Her ideas were
better than mine. There's something to be said for trusting the judgment of
professionals.
Now
that my book is out there in some bookstores, competing for a potential buyer’s
attention, with so many other books, I appreciate the eye-catching and
story-representing cover all the more. I may be a little biased, but, judging
this book by its cover, I’d say the reader is in for quite a ride.
Going
Through the Change is going through a change in price for a couple of days in
early August. On August 5th and 6th you can get the
Kindle edition for free on Amazon. Check it out at: http://bitly.com/face-the-change
Samantha Bryant is a middle school Spanish teacher by day
and a mom and novelist by night. That makes her a superhero all the time. Her
debut novel, Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel is now for sale by
Curiosity Quills. You can find her online on her blog,
Twitter, on Facebook, on Amazon, on Goodreads, on
the Curiosity
Quills page, or on Google+.
Thanks Samantha!
