Day 67: Author and series visual branding

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I had an appointment to chat with my cover designer today, and we had a great talk about the visual author branding for both my Regency and my contemporary romantic suspense series. I wanted a consistent look across all the books in each series that would be appropriate for my genres, but would also help my series be recognizable even when the covers were only small thumbnails.

The cover she had designed for my first Lady Wynwood’s Spies volume is absolutely beautiful, but after we discussed my author branding, we decided to tweak it a little bit and she’ll also eventually change the cover for The Spinster’s Christmas to match the adjusted look.

We also discussed the cover for my Regency serial novel, which will be a side novel for the main series. I wasn’t certain yet how long it was going to be and if it ended up being as long as I fear, it might be two or three volumes. So we talked about how to make the three (or however many) volumes for that novel to be different from the main series but similar enough that it was obviously still belonging to the series, and also how to make the different covers for the volumes similar so that the volumes are linked visually.

As for my romantic suspense series, we looked at lots of romantic suspense covers on Amazon and discussed things we liked and didn’t like, the choice of people or non-people on the covers, font treatments, and visual elements I wanted to link the books in the series. Right now I only have two books in the Sonoma series (and the rest of the books are published by Love Inspired Suspense) but eventually I intend to write a Hawaiian romantic suspense series which will have Asian characters and which I want to translate into Japanese.

I wanted an author brand that I could use for all my romantic suspense series, but also a unique visual for each series that would make each series appear different from each other. Coming up with things like that was really hard! I also decided that I prefer people on my romantic suspense covers over settings because I think that makes it look more like romantic suspense as opposed to simply suspense.

We had some great ideas and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with for my new covers for Necessary Proof and Unshakeable Pursuit.

Unfortunately after the phone call I had more health issues—more bad IBS symptoms--and then I had a sinus headache from my allergies that kept me from working.

So essentially today’s been another wash in terms of writing because of my health. I hope tomorrow will be better.

Time spent writing: 0
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 3 hours, 42 minutes

My takeaway for today: When it comes to covers, since I have no graphic design experience, I’m really glad to rely on the expertise of a professional rather than my own opinions, and to let my designer guide my tastes into something marketable.

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