I’m about a week away from finishing the first draft of the sequel to “The Liberty Box”… I JUST decided it was going to be a trilogy after all, and not just two books. Mostly this was because that’s just where the plot trajectory took me. It’s kind of fun to ignore my outlines sometimes…
So that means I’m going to have to come up with 1) titles, and 2) covers. The latter is especially challenging this time around, because of an email I got a few weeks ago from one of my former editors.
She had greatly admired the cover for “The Liberty Box,” so much so that one of her other clients had wanted the name of the person who had designed it for me. (Admire with me for a minute.)
But then a few weeks ago, she sent me the link to this other book on Amazon.
See a problem?
Then at the book festival last weekend, I chatted with someone else, who pulled up yet another book on her phone and showed it to me, evidently having used the very same clip art!
Needless to say, I’m a little bummed. I paid a lot of money for that cover, and it looks like 1) I’m going to have a heck of a time finding a cover with a similar look to it (I’d thought I could just have the same cover artist design me something in the same genre, but since she didn’t design the first one that doesn’t seem too likely), and 2) who wants to be a copycat?
So… rebranding, here I come!
[…] Last week I mentioned that I’d found out my fabulous cover for “The Liberty Box” wasn’t original, after all. I wrote to my cover designer, and she explained that she’d gotten the image from clip art, which had not been licensed at the time by anyone else, but obviously has been since. Still, she offered to redesign something original for me (at no extra charge!), still using clip art as a base but tweaking it significantly. I asked her to make it look absolutely as similar to the current cover as possible. That way I don’t have to re-brand completely (plus I doubt I’d find something else I liked as well)… but I’ll still end up with something original. […]