[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

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Wow. Thanks Dazrin. You are really making me think. (Thank you for checking my covers. I'm attaching a screenshot of them.)

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Looking at your covers on Amazon, it seems like your other three novels already are fairly consistent and appropriate for their genre, at least assuming they are all romance books in some way*. They all have a picture of a couple at the top, then the title, another background picture then your name.

Here's the deal. I am not a genre writer. If someone put a gun to my head and said, 'What genre do you come closest to?' I would say, Suspense.

However THE TEST is a romance. I'm actually thinking of taking that off the market or publishing it under another name. FRONT ROW is a short story and that is definitely coming off the market.

So that leaves me with THE FIND, MAN OF GOD and JAMIE'S GAMBLE. Well, I had a cover designer do MAN OF GOD a long time ago. Then I did covers for THE FIND and JAMIE'S GAMBLE. They were not very good. I met up with a different cover designer. I gave her information about the books (blurbs, synopses etc) but she did not read the books. Anyway, I told her that THE TEST was a romance, so that cover is really appropriate to the genre. But (as you intuited) THE FIND is not a romance. The closest thing it comes to would be 'romantic suspense' and even then it is much more suspense than romance. It's really a suspense book with a strong romantic element.

However, (and this was my fault of course) I went along with the romance nature of the covers the new cover designer did, figuring the bottom portions of the covers suggested the non-romance elements (and that the blurbs would help too).

Several people have since told me that the covers for THE FIND and JAMIE'S GAMBLE do not fit the story. They say that the books are suspense and the covers should reflect that.

So I decided to re-do all my covers, and yeah, with an eye toward branding.

However, I must say that JAMIE'S GAMBLE is not purely suspense. (That's what I was saying earlier--I am not really a genre writer.) It is closer to 'Women's fiction' with a strong female character who finds her way through a tragedy (her lover's execution).

If I (and I don't dare to compare myself to his talent) would compare my books to a writer it would be Dennis Lehane. Deep, complex books. Sometimes with happy endings. Sometimes with unhappy (but ultimately redemptive) endings. All suspenseful and unpredictable.

So really, stand-alone books.

(I'll attach a screenshot of Lehane's latest books.)

Yes, he has a slightly different font for THE DROP but everything else is the same font (including title and name) and I would say pretty close to the font I use in the title of the new version (in the first post in this thread) of MAN OF GOD, which is Bebas Neue.

So my books are all different but similar. MAN OF GOD has very little romance and a lot of suspense. THE FIND has a strong romance element and a lot of suspense. JAMIE'S GAMBLE is the most different of the three. There is romance and suspense but it also has a tragic ending (similar I suppose to Nicholas Sparks' 'cancer romance.')

So your post has really made me think about what to use for the fonts (whether the same or different) in the titles. At this point I'm still leaning toward using the same font (Bebas Neue) for the titles.

I say that because I know several of Lehane's books are dissimilar and yet he has varied the fonts (of his later books anyway) very little.

But you're making me think!

Originally Posted by Dazrin

If you are keeping both pictures I certainly wouldn't have them adjacent to each other with the title above, too easy to mess that up and make it look muddled.

I wasn't sure which pictures you referring to here (in "both pictures").

Originally Posted by Dazrin

For fonts, I agree that having your name be in the same font and the same location/size makes a lot of sense and the font you are using goes well with the elaborate title fonts in the romance books and with the simple font used for the thriller/suspense book (new version). Beyond that, I don't think I would want to have the fonts be the same, especially across genres. If all three of your romance books had the same font for the titles I would be much more inclined to think they were part of series. Having them in the same location and approximately the same overall size doesn't make me take that leap. For a series I would certainly keep font and color palettes the same or complimentary but for stand-alone books that seems like too much.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want people thinking the books were a series, especially since I am really a stand-alone writer. (I have three more books coming out and they are all very different.) So yeah, THE FIND and JAMIE'S GAMBLE would've been okay had they been romances. But for the future I'm thinking all of the covers will be vastly different (image-wise anyway). (For instance see the attachment for SAVING BABY, which is one of the three books coming out soon.)

So the cover images will be vastly different and yet the font for my name will be the same and the font for the titles will be the same. At least that's the plan for now.

And yes, Bebas Neue for the title font is suspense or thriller but the books (except for THE TEST) all have a ton of suspense in them, so Bebas Neue is good fit (for the new covers). And I believe the very different covers (I'll attach a mockup for yet another book I've coming out called AMERICAN BALLERINA, which is about a young American woman who thinks she can dance at London's prestigious Royal Ballet but doesn't have the talent or pedigree. She's an unreliable narrator, pretty unstable.) will tell the readers the books are not strict genre books or part of a series.

Like now, I'm looking at SAVING BABY and AMERICAN BALLERINA. Both books have identical fonts, but I wouldn't think they were part of a series. SAVING BABY says suspense. I (LOL) don't know what AMERICAN BALLERINA says, but I don't know, I don't think either are pigeon holed into a specific genre label, and actually I think that is a good thing. (The cover designer who did the later covers did a cover for SAVING BABY and it was of an empty crib and it just seemed so cliche to me.)

I'm coming to terms with the idea that I'm not a genre writer. (I'm not!)

Appreciate your help in this!