Finding the energy in your work

Sky Daughter's new cover

Writing, once there is a desire to make the work public, involves marketing. You can write your whole life and not worry about what I am about to discuss below. But if you want to sell your stories, then the issue becomes twofold-- how do you get them seen and how do you describe, in very few words and images, what they are about?

As much as I have written here about how to write or get inspired to write or about what I am writing, equally I have tried to cover this other important angle. How do you market and how do you reduce your work to those key phrases that will convince an agent/editor/reader to take a chance on your work?

Now there are many writers who are far more successful than I am and might have a different view of this. Some pay someone to help them market their books but somewhere they had to go through this phase of figuring out how to reduce what they have created to a few key thoughts.

 I sometimes get involved in discussions at Amazon in the forums called Meet Our Authors. One of them, the western romance group, had a discussion going last week about covers and that interested me enough to put in my own two cents. I enjoyed reading what others had thought and done.

What I had said is the cover should depict the energy of the book. It should give the reader that first taste of what they would find when they opened it. A day or so later, I looked at one of my own books and realized where the cover looked great, showed the romance, truthfully it really didn't say anything about the deeper energy of the book.

third cover for Sky Daughter

So I went back and began looking at CanStock, my favorite image site, for something that might do a better job. I don't think the photo I needed had been there before; but when I saw it this time, I knew it was the one. I actually bought two of the same woman but only used the first as it more showed what I believed the book was about-- the growth of power in a woman who reluctantly finds she must come to terms with who her family was and who she is. 

The irony is the newest cover is closer to the one I first intended to use for the book (it's had three since that time) except that first digital painting was more like a watercolor than what a lot of the readers want in their books. I like its more painterly look a lot, but I didn't think it would work for readers who make snap judgments on what they will read and do judge a book by its cover.

  first cover for Sky Daughter

After redoing the cover, I looked at its trailer. My gosh, it also didn't do a good job of truly telling what this story was about. So I redid it also. Marketing is something am learning as I go. I may never have it all figured out. In that, it's a lot like life.