Preparing to Publish

I'm nearly there...

This week, I've been working hard to get 'Fire' ready for publication. I've given it a final read through, to make sure that there's no errors (fingers crossed I've got them all...)

I've also been putting a cover together. The hardest part, by far, of this, was working out what it was actually feasible to do. I didn't want to buy a stock image, as then the same photo could appear on any other book. There was an image of a girl on fire, that I found on Pinterest and would have loved to use, but I couldn't find the source anywhere. I also don't know anyone who looks remotely close to how I image Roxy or Jasmine. Instead, I enlisted the help of my brother, sister and fiance and got creative. My brother got a new DSLR camera for Christmas and I got him to take photos of my sister and I with our hands, outstretched, in focus, and the rest of us blurred (since neither of us look right for the characters...) My fiance then fired up the chiminea (in the very cold garden...) so that we could take our own pictures of the flames.

Once we had sorted out the images, I opened up Photoshop to try and turn them into something remotely professional looking. I'm quite pleased with the outcome. It was by no means my first, second or even third attempt, but I got there in the end, with a lot of really supportive and constructive feedback from my family.

However, my next issue was that the cover looked to bare: most books have series titles, tag lines or quotes from other authors on the front. Since the last option was definitely out and I'm not sure that I was to advertise Fire as the first in a series on the front cover, we decided that I needed to come up with a tag line.

Cue hours of brainstorming, a lot of cliches and (again) lots and lots of help from my family and we came up with something which suited the book and sounded intriguing: Is Control over the elements a gift, or a curse? I liked this because it links to both protagonists, isn't too girly and (hopefully) engages the reader.

Maybe I'll post some of the funnier, rejected options next time. I'll also include a copy of the cover; I only had a copy of the Photoshop file on my laptop - I need to work out what format Amazon need it in so that I can save it as something else.

Only a few days until publication!