The first thing I did was find someone who I knew had experience designing covers for authors who wrote in the same genre as me. Luckily, my friend Erica met Abbi Glines a while back and was recommended Stephanie Mooney who is a cover artist. Erica mentioned Stephanie to me and I went on her website to see some of her work. In all honesty, Stephanie does amazing work! She has designed covers for Abbi Glines, Tammara Webber and Liz Reinhardt to name a few. I knew right away that I wanted Stephanie to design my cover.
I sent Stephanie a message and asked for a cover that was "fresh and clean with a white background". I gave her a vague description of the characters and she came back with these two mock-ups.
I seriously loved them both and at first I had NO IDEA how I was going to pick one. Couldn't I have them both? They're so pretty!
After calming down, my eyes kept going back to the white cover. I loved the way the title was vertical--you don't see that with many covers. I loved the way the title separated the characters and the cover really stood out to me.
What happened next was a little crazy. My original title for the book had been Impossible but a week into writing it, I changed it to With Me. However, when I'd queried Stephanie, I queried with the original title. So, you know what I did? I changed the title back to the old one. Yeah, I'm a little nutty.
I asked Stephanie to make two small changes: add a tattoo on the male character's hand and change the font of the title because it was too bold. Stephanie quickly made the changes and this is what we ended up with:
I couldn't be happier with it! And here's the cover for the paperback copy!
Seeing the cover really drives home that you have written a novel and that other people are going to read it. It's such a fun process though and I can't wait to do it all over again for the next book!
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