What makes a striking romance book cover? What does a cover say about the subgenre of romance book? Is it Contemporary, Paranormal, Historical, Romantic Suspense, Regency, Gothic, New Adult, Western, or Fantasy? Oh, and there are subgenres to those categories. Whew! Is your book sweet, funny, or dark? Is it erotic? These are questions every writer should ask when either choosing a designer or creating the cover, especially if s/he is self-publishing. I’ve had three erotic romances published by e-publishers, and I had nothing to say about the cover, though I fortunately liked two out of three of them. The third, not so much. Maybe bestselling authors have more input. I wouldn’t know, not having reached that status. I bought back the rights to Sexual Persuasion and redid the cover. It happened to be a cover I first used for my sexy romantic suspense, Hooked , but too many people thought it was an erotic romance. So I changed Hooked and later used that cover minus the New York scene....

When I wrote my first fiction book, Angel Sometimes , there were a lot of decisions I had to make. First, I needed to decide if I would query it, ask the publisher of my three non-fiction books to handle it, or self-publish. At the time, I wanted to get the book up on Amazon as an e-book, so I decided to do it myself. For me, the most difficult part of the process wasn't writing or editing, or formatting it to meet the requirements.   I had to figure out how I wanted the cover to look. Hours of many days were spent looking at pictures online, some free, others at a reasonable rate. I couldn’t find what I was looking for -- a flower garden.   I had a flower garden in mind because it plays an important role in the story. In the end, my husband and I drove to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and took pictures there. After a few hours of walking and snapping shots, I came home with one that I liked enough to use as the cover art. That was the original cove...

By Dani Greer/Chief Red Pencil Welcome to the Blood-Red Pencil blog, readers. How's the year going for you so far? We have exciting news from Kathryn Craft this month about her new book, which she's been blogging about here, and it ties right into one of our new monthly features: Cover Reveal! Good cover art is so important to the success of your book, and you've probably noticed with e-books that a bad cover can sometimes keep you from buying, or even downloading a free book. I know I'm that way. But it's a lot easier to "re-cover" from a bad art choice with e-books than with a print version, and long-time BRP blogger, Helen Ginger, will share her before and after re-covery of Angel Sometimes later in the month. (I think that joke now qualifies as a "darling", don't you? Let's kill it and hope it never recovers.) I've kept my eyes open for good book cover artists over the past few years, and have noticed someone lately who ...