Writing Book 2 - Part 4

Covers, Titles & Blurbs

Covers
One of my favourite parts of self-publishing A Beginner's Guide To Salad was getting the chance to design the cover myself. I hadn't a clue how to do this but decided to learn as I went along - and I'm still doing that now! I love playing around with the program and figuring out new techniques. It's sometimes quite hard translating the image in my head onto the computer screen, but it's fun seeing what I can come up with.

I originally created a cover that was pretty close to the image in my head, but after leaving it a while, I decided it wasn't right and started it from scratch. The new cover is a simpler design, but I love it and can't wait to share it. It isn't quite finished yet as it needs refining, but it'll be 'out there' soon.

Titles
Sometimes titles are easy. But (for me, at least) mostly they are not. For Book 2, the title was inspired by (nicer talk for 'stolen from') a Take That song. I knew the plot of the book, I knew my characters, but I didn't have a clue what to call it until a particular song was played on the radio. It was a proper Eureka! moment and it stuck.

Blurbs
I've read a lot of blurbs over the years, but I feel like a newbie when it comes to writing them, having only ever written public ones for A Beginner's Guide To Salad and A Beginner's Guide To Christmas. When submitting to agents I always dreaded writing the synopsis - urgh - but I have discovered that blurbs are HARD. You have to sum up your book in not a lot of words while making it sound vaguely interesting. You'd think writing an 80,000 word book would be the hard bit - Ha! I've had a few goes at writing the blurb for Book 2. I think I'll need a few more!

As well as sharing the cover, I'll be sharing the title and (severely practiced) blurb soon!