Cover Art Woes

There’s no doubt about it: nailing the cover is as important as writing the book!  I’d love for that not to be the case, but it is.  

I’ve been working for the last few months on the final touches of my soon-to-be-released e-book The Mummies of Blogspace9.  It’s about undead conquistadors who... well, that’s a story for another day.  But geez, the cover is killing me.  

I’ve browsed a number of prefab cover art sites.  I’ve seen some great covers and some lousy covers.  But oddly enough, nothing that really captured the essence of my story.  I wanted something that screamed “read this chilling tale of conquistador mummies who blog about stolen Inca gold.”  Maybe that’s too much to ask for.

In the end, I decided to go it alone.  I needed some cool graphics and some chilling text.   And I also realized I had to narrow down some of the thematics.  You can’t fit everything into a tiny image that someone is going to see on Amazon.  So minimally, I decided I wanted an image of a mummy, something scary, and if possible, some computer elements.  Not too much to ask for, right?

So I hunted through istockphoto.com, then I fired up InDesign, and here’s what came down the chute:

Cover #1 meets my first criterion.  It does indeed have a mummy on it.  But it’s not scary.  And it’s a really bad cover.  OK, now for my second try:

Cover #2 meets the second and third criteria.  It’s very scary, and has computer stuff, but that’s technically a zombie, not a mummy.  And it is also a really bad cover.  Third try:

I know, right!  Cover #3 is adorable - a kitten on an internet logo!  Yeah, that has to go.  Fourth try:

I think this is it!  Cover #4 is hauntingly scary, has a mummy, and has some computer stuff.  Plus the text is nice.  I think this is the one I’m going with.

I’ll let you know when the book is ready, but for now, I’m happy with the cover.

Also, how’s this for a teaser:  Horror has a new URL.