Custom or Pre-made?

Cover designed by Cover It! Designs

If you’re not sure which option is best, you should check out designers who offer both. Cover It! Designs and Go On Write give you this flexibility. They have great pre-made covers to choose from. If none of them strike your fancy, then both offer affordable custom cover packages for ebooks, print books and promotional material.

I’ve already worked with Go On Write and been very pleased with the quick turnaround and flexibility. The gorgeous cover of Choose Me, the collection of short stories I’m finishing up and which I shared with you last week, is a Go On Write creation and I love it!

Author Ada Slowe has worked with Cover It! Designs and recommends them highly. The cover of her upcoming novel, The Power of Love, is atmospheric and hauntingly beautiful in my opinion.

Only Interested in Custom? 

Then you can try Design for Writers. You can check out their portfolio on their Facebook page. I am currently working with Andrew from Design for Writers and look forward to a cover reveal soon.

Gorgeous cover created by Sue Traynor

Or…you could work with an illustrator, which is what I’ve done for Playing House, a novel I plan on releasing in a few months. I worked with Sue Traynor, an illustrator whose work I’d first come across through istockphoto. I liked her whimsical style and I thought it would translate well for the story I was telling. I couldn’t find any stock images that worked for my story so I contacted her about creating custom images. I provided her with reference images, a short summary of the book’s plot and the feel I wanted to capture. And she created the cover for Playing House, which I think looks great. Can’t wait to finally be able to say the book is ready. For now, we’ll have to settle for a sneak peek at the cover.

Working with Sue was great. If you write women’s fiction or chick lit and you want an illustrated cover with custom images, then you should definitely get in touch with Sue.

That’s it for now. I’ll post links to more designers and illustrators as I continue compiling my reference list.

Happy reading (and writing)!

My mom, Barbara Golden

I don’t usually write about my mom here but I thought it was a good idea since it is Mother’s Day. My mom and I don’t see each other so often since I live in Sweden and she is still in Philadelphia. But once or twice a year, when I am in Philly, I drive her crazy with telling her what to do (like take more walks since her doctor said she should) and she drives me crazy by hovering when I try to cook dinner for her. We bicker with one another but we know we love each other.

When I first told my mom I wanted to be a writer, she thought I meant I wanted to be a journalist. Heck, I thought I wanted to be a journalist too. I thought I could be a clever news reporter by day and a novelist by night. When I was in high school, I won the chance to take part in a semester-long journalism workshop at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. While it was interesting, I realized I didn’t want to be a reporter. I wanted to be novelist. My mom (and my dad) wanted me to have a job with a steady income–I think she really wanted me to be an accountant or a lawyer. But I didn’t have a head for numbers and I thought courtroom antics were boring. Plus, I had this aversion to having to represent anyone I thought was guilty. And when I was in college, everyone I knew in law school always looked miserable. I didn’t want to be miserable. I wanted to be happy writing short stories and novels.

So when I told my mother I was going to graduate school to study creative writing, she was a little concerned. How would I support myself once I graduated? Would I be able to find a job that would pay enough to cover my student loans? While she tried to get me to see reason, she didn’t try to force me into something that wouldn’t make me happy. I think she realized that sending me to a high school that specialized in engineering and science was a big mistake since I didn’t understand anything while I was there. I am still amazed I graduated with as good of grades as I received. I felt lost the entire time.

My mom grew up in Smithfield, Virginia and moved to Philadelphia when she was a teenager. She didn’t get a chance to go to college until she was older and had already raised three kids. My granddad was a bit old school and didn’t believe in paying for his oldest daughter to go to college. He thought she would just drop out and get married. But going to college was always important to my mom, and she encouraged all of us to go–she didn’t want us to be stuck like a lot of other kids in similar situations. She wanted us to see the world and to experience new things. I watched her studying for her courses and it increased my interest in going to college. So–even if I didn’t always tell her this–she was a role model for me. I saw how she worked during the day and went to school in the evening, and I knew I could study too. I knew I could do whatever it took to get an education.

I never used to let my mom read the stories I wrote. I thought she would be shocked or angry about anything I wrote, especially since whatever was going on in my life usually ended up in my fiction. And my mom is more conservative than I am. But when she read my graduate thesis, she didn’t raise an eyebrow at the stories–not even the ones that were a little graphic. She just told me how proud she was of me. And that made me feel like I was doing the right thing.

So I hope my mom is having an awesome Mother’s Day in Philadelphia. I’m pretty sure my brother and sister have done something nice for her. I will treat Barbs to something nice when I am next in Philadelphia. I keep telling her that Tord and I are going to take her away from everything for a few days. Maybe we’ll actually succeed this time.

Love you, Mom!

David’s no-nonsense approach is spot-on. I think he’s got another winner here.

He shares with readers tips on positioning your books for discoverability, cost-effective ways to promote your work and how to minimize the amount of promotion you do and for more writing time–and still sell books. So if you are as curious as I am about how to build your platform without having to spend all hours of the day on Twitter or Facebook (especially when you know you should be writing), then check out Let’s Get Visible. For more information, head over to David’s blog.

Choose Me’s lovely cover

A few months ago, I shared with you a cover for a project called Choose Me. I originally thought I would have published it by April 15. That was my deadline, but then life got in the way. Well, now I am getting closer to feeling like it will be ready soon. I’ve got the first part of it under control. I’m just making some minor tweaks to it. Part One of Choose Me is a novella set in Edinburgh. Part Two will be four short stories set in Philadelphia, Richmond, Rome and London. The stories still need a tiny bit of tweaking but tweaking short stories isn’t nearly as daunting a task as tweaking a novel.

The common thread for the novella and the stories is people making choices. Choices about staying, choices about who they love and what they want. My new deadline is June 1. I think I’ll have it ready by then.

Choose Me will be available as an ebook and a POD paperback. I’ll keep you posted about the official launch date. It might be around Midsummer (June 21) since I will be in Italy the first two weeks of June.

That’s it for now! It’s bedtime for me.

Happy reading (and writing)!

P.S.

Thanks to James at goonwrite.com for making such a beautiful cover for me!

Check it out…

English Project: The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, By: Heidi W. Durrow.

Get thee to Riffle…

I wonder…how many of you are using Riffle Books? Yesterday I received an invitation to try it and I spent part of this evening checking it out. It’s like Goodreads in that it aims to be a community of readers and writers. You can find out about books, create lists to share with others of the books you’ve read or plan to read. I rather like it so far. If you’re interested in checking it out, click here.

I think I’ll continue with Goodreads and use Riffle, but for those of you who are anti-Amazon (the new owners of Goodreads) Riffle could be an alternative.

Anyway, go and check it out. It’s very visual–almost like Pinterest (my other favorite distraction) for books.

Happy reading (and writing)!

One of Sue Traynor’s illustrations, © Susan Traynor. Source: istockphoto.com

I’m working on a few manuscripts simultaneously, which should be confusing but my brain seems to be able to handle it. It must be from work–I have to juggle so many projects at once and keep everything straight. Maybe that’s why I get bored when I only have one thing to work on. I suspect I have a touch of ADD–I have a hard time concentrating, I leave things unfinished in my private life because other things distract me so easily. Good thing I have Tord to remind me to finish what I start.

So now that I found all the chapters of Playing House and I’ve started going through them to see where they need fine tuning, I thought the best way to stay on track was to give myself a deadline and to make a cover. But I couldn’t find a cover image that really captured the mood I wanted.

In my istockhphoto.com search, I found illustrator Sue Traynor. She does great vector images that are fun, colorful and flirty–perfect for a novel about lost loves reconnecting in a small town in Vermont. I found out Sue does custom images and contacted her about my story and what I was looking for. After exchanging a few emails and reference images, we decided we’d work together on this. I’m super excited! We start next week. Soon I will be able to share with you the cover of Playing House, which I want to launch in August.

Also,  A Little Night Music, the other novel I am finishing up, will have a cover reveal soon too. Possibly by the end of the month!

Cover of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland

Two posts in one day–will wonders never cease? Just found out that Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and who is one of my favorites, has a new book coming out in June. It’s called Sisterland and it sounds amazing! 

So what’s it about? Identical twin sisters Kate and Violet are as unlike one another as possible–except they both share the gift of premonition, a secret Kate inadvertantly reveals when the girls are thirteen. And this revelation sets both girls on diverging paths. 

Fast forward twenty years later. Kate is a suburban housewife who supresses her gift while Violet is still single and working as a psychic. When Violet sets off a media storm by predicting a major earthquake in the St. Louis area, both women must deal with the legacy of the past and the unsettling future they’ve both glimpsed.

Hooked? I know I am! Pre-ordering it now for my Kindle.

Not sure who created this–but thank you!

It’s May Day–a much-needed dayoff from work when I am supposed to be protesting and marching according to Swedish tradition, but really all I’ve done is take care of things I don’t normally have time to do. At least I’ve done four useful things : go to a meeting with the election team for my tenants association, take care of a load of laundry, take a walk and file my Swedish income tax. At the weekend, I’ll file my US income tax form. (One of the good things about living overseas is that we have a tax filing extension until June.)

I’m getting closer to that point where I think one of my novels will be set free to the great, wide world. And it makes me think I need to have a separate website for my books and then this blog for writing reviews. I’ll still write about writing and what I’m reading here. But anything related to the books I publish will be on the website instead. Going to fix a domain and then link the website to the blog. I’ll probably fix it so you can order the books via the website as well.

Anyway, that’s today’s post. Happy May Day!

And happy reading (and writing)!

A road in Vermont…

A few days ago, I decided to return to a story I started back in 2007 but never finished. There are a number of reasons why I never finished it. Weird comments during workshop review with my former writers group, especially silly ones like “we don’t want to read about Swedes”–not conducive to writing; hitting the 45K mark and getting stuck, worrying that no one would want to read the story. You name it, I worrired about it. So instead of soldiering on, I put the manuscript aside and forgot about it. Then my old computer died. And I lost my original flash drive. And I thought I’d lost that manuscript forever.

Well, the gods of Fate were kind to me. Maybe they were smiling upon me when they saw I’d cleaned off my desk. Well, I found half of the novel on the PC I bought to replace the computer that died. And I found the entire manuscript on my new flash drive–it was in a folder that had been given the name of another book I started writing but then gave up on because I deemed it boring.

So now I found the old story set in Vermont about Cassie and Michael and I’ve decided to finish it and I will give. I’ve given myself a 30 May deadline to finish the first draft. It’s also the same deadline I have for myself to finish revising Maybe Baby. Well, I like a challenge.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Happy reading (and writing)!