Today I'm delighted to welcome you to the start of a new series called Cover Love. Cover Love is exactly what it sounds like - it's all to do with what makes a book cover special. In this series, authors will pick a cover of their own to talk about from their own perspective. It's going to be fascinating.
Launching the series is psychological suspense author Linda Huber. Linda is Scottish but has lived for a long time in Switzerland. The first of her books that I read was The Cold, Cold Sea, which I found complex, disturbing and utterly gripping. I've been a fan ever since. I once wrote a blog in which I dubbed Linda 'The Queen of Creepy' and that sums up her books - ordinary people in ordinary situations that gradually turn out to be not so ordinary after all.
Time for me to be quiet now, so that Linda can share her own particular Cover Love.
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I love the cover-choosing part of being a writer – after poring over words for so long to get the story right, working with images and finding the perfect cover is a welcome contrast. My books are a mixture of traditionally and self-published, so for some I’ve had more say in the cover image than for others, but it’s always fun.
What I try to find for my books is something eye-catching, whether it’s the image itself, or the colour, or the contrasts. Also important is that you can read the title easily on a thumbnail image –fonts play a big part here – and that the image is suitable for the genre.
The really crucial thing, though, is that the cover fits the story. Most of mine are self-explanatory: The Attic Room has a spooky door on the cover; The Cold Cold Sea has quite a lot of, you’ve guessed it, cold sea, and Stolen Sister has a pair of baby shoes with smoke swirling around them and the tagline: What happens when a baby goes missing? Chosen Child with its vivid turquoise butterfly is less obvious, but when you read the book, it’s clear.
At the same time, this was a difficult book to find a cover for - I was very aware that the image shouldn’t be misleading. The title is The Runaway, but a picture of a running teen wouldn’t be right for the story. There’s more than one way to run away, and in the book, there’s more than one person running, too.
Sometimes, you’re just lucky with cover images. I work with The Cover Collection, who offer both premade and custom-made covers, so I opened their website one day to make contact about the new book. There staring up at me in the premade section was the perfect cover image. I didn’t change a single pixel, though the designers in The Cover Collection will tweak things like brightness, background colour etc even for premade covers. I emailed straightaway, and after adding the title and other etceteras, The Runaway had its cover. The paperback will be out in summer, and I can’t wait to see it on my bookshelf!
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The Runaway blurb:
Keep your secrets close to home...
Bad things happen in threes – or so it seems to Nicola. The death of her mother-in-law coincides with husband Ed losing his job and daughter Kelly getting into trouble with the police. Time to abandon their London lifestyle and start again by the sea in far-away Cornwall.
It should be the answer to everything – a new home, a new job for Ed and a smaller, more personal school for fifteen-year-old Kelly. But the teenager hates her new life, and it doesn’t take long before events spiral out of control and the second set of bad things starts for Nicola.
Some secrets can’t be buried. * * * *
Linda Huber's links:
Linda's Amazon author page
Her author page on Facebook
Chat with Linda on Twitter
Linda's website, including her blog
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