LOGOstephaniecasher

Cover Crisis

by Stephanie Casher on November 21, 2014

So we’ve hit a snag in the cover design process… and I need everyone’s help.

We’ve been working on the design for The Space Between cover for the past few months. This has been a really challenging process for me, because I’m not really visual, so I didn’t have a “concept” in mind for the cover.  At all.  So I wasn’t able to give my designer precise direction, and instead asked him to “throw something together.”

It took a while, and a lot of tweaking, but we finally settled on something I liked (see below). I was so relieved to be done with this, as it was a stressful process. After my editor finished reading the book, I sent her the sample cover to see what she thought.  Her response:

“Your book is a character driven, internal struggle and growth book that has a literary tone. This cover is commercial.  Covers set expectations. I’m afraid you’ll get hammered in reviews if  people are expecting one thing and get another.”

I respect this individual. She also has a long, successful career in the book business, and I consider her to be an industry professional who knows what she’s talking about. And while part of me genuinely loves this cover, another part of me isn’t fully convinced it’s the right cover for the book I’ve written.

So I thought I’d ask what you all think… What are your feelings/thoughts/impressions about this cover? Does it look like a “Stephanie Casher” novel? I know most of you haven’t read The Space Between (though you can if you want), but if you picked up or downloaded this book, what would some of your expectations be? As a reader in general, how do you feel if a cover misleads you about the content of a book? If the cover doesn’t sit right with you, why? How could it be improved?

TheSpaceBetweenCoverFinal

I’m really not sure how to proceed, and would really love to hear people’s thoughts to help me think through my little dilemma. Once we finalize some kind of cover, we’ll be that much closer to a release date!

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: