Came home to a driveway of chalk pastel drawings. The kids have been busy.
Anonymous kid art on the driveway.
Really, Really, Really Bad Book Covers
A couple years ago I stumbled across a blog dedicated to bad book covers. The blog was hilarious but, sadly, inactive soon about a year after I discovered it. Thankfully there's another site out there that's picked up where the other blog left off and is posting such cringe inducing beauties like the following.
Check out more covers at Lousy Book Covers when you get a chance.
Hat Tip: The Passive Voice.
Cover Voting Results
I hoped to post the final Marrying a Widower cover up on my blog by now. However, I requested some changes to the winning cover and haven't seen them yet. Even though I don't have the cover yet, I am willing to post the final results. (If you don't know what the covers look like, you can view all three of them here.)
Thanks to everyone who voted. I'll post the final cover--a slightly modified version of cover #1-- as soon as I get it back from the graphic designer.
Dating a Widower Book Cover Concepts
For the last couple weeks I've been working with a book cover designer for the upcoming Dating a Widower book. After a couple weeks of back and forth I've narrowed the concepts I like down to two. Since my target audience spends a lot of time on this blog, I thought I'd solicit your feedback and see which one you like better. Right now I'm mainly looking for feedback on the concepts--the wedding ring "O" or the couple walking. If there are reasons you like one over the other, feel free to elaborate. If you have comments on the font, colors, etc. that's fine too but that's not something I want to spend too much time on right now. Once I narrow it down to one concept, I'll worry about those other details. And, yes, I have a favorite and no I'm not telling you what it is--at least not right now.
Leave a comment below or send me an email with your thoughts.
Update: Welcome all those who are visiting from The Passive Voice Blog. You can read more about my decision to turn down a publishing contract for this book and go indie with this book here and here.
Concept 1
Concept 2
The World’s Worst Book Covers
While looking for a book cover for my post on self publishing, I stumbled across a blog run by a former librarian dedicated to “truly hideous” book covers. Then again, the subject matter of some of these books derserve awful covers. (William Shatner? Shattner Quake? What the...?)
Unless you’re self publishing, the cover is one of the few things out of the writer’s control of the final product. Bad covers can make a good book unappealing. That’s why any publisher will contract with or employ talented graphic designers to make their books pop off the shelves. Whoever did the covers on these blogs should be fired.
Just a few bad book covers you can find at that blog are the following.
You can see more bad covers here. Happy looking (or not).