Care to Comment?

After about a year of composition, self-editing, beta reading, edits and rewrites, the Sea Goddess release is forthcoming soon. The image above is what I believe to be the final design for the ebook cover. The paperback cover will of course wrap around with a spine and back with all of the trimmings. But this post is about the art.

Ebook cover for the forthcoming novel. Print cover will be based on this.

How does this look to you?

Please comment with your honest and tactful responses, especially about emotional tone. Does this cover give you an itch to pick up the physical book or to open the book’s preview and see if you’d want to read it? If not, why not?

The genre is literary and mainstream. The story is taken from life with my former wife who became a lifelong friend. Nancy was the inspiration for the character Jess in this book. It could have been a memoir except for that irresistible urge that drove me to enhance it slightly to create the most irresistible story I could tell.

Please use the comment function at the bottom of this blog post to offer any observations or suggestions about the cover. The icon is small so look carefully, on the left below the signature line.

Your constructive help is greatly appreciated. Does this cover pique your curiosity enough to give the book a chance?

Thanks in advance,

Joseph

Five Stars Feel Damned Good

Not to brag, because this happens to so many writers, but to acknowledge a shared experience: I received a five-star review for one of my stories.

It feels so wonderful to see a reader really “getting” one of my stories and being excited enough to generate top honors. Now I wonder if anyone else will feel good enough about it to care and say something. Whatever. I’ll be fine but now we’ll see if that starts something good that expands and continues. Something I can build on as an obscure writer, late in life, short on backlist but long on skills, patience and the insight of experience.

I celebrated by revising the cover to add the five-star medallion. And Amazon actually got it right. They posted the new cover on the book’s listing and my Amazon Author Page.

There must be some reason Alinka Rutkowska, the book marketing expert and coach, prefers books to have medallioned covers so much. We’ll see if this gets some attention and action. There’s plenty more of the same where it came from.

Do find it, and please read the editorial review I posted and be ready to be challenged and/or edified, if you get the book. It’s strong-flavored narrative with a potentially controversial ending — for some readers but I couldn’t resist after how my whole family has suffered from the overzealous doctrines and self-serving practices of a powerful but still-medieval christian church that I once thought I could be part of.

Okay, you spiritual bullies, take that!

JR