Ta da! Finally, ‘The Big Deep’ Has a Cover…

Back in August I posted about my very angst-ridden time trying to get a cover design for my young adult novel, The Big Deep.  Believe it or not this whole project (getting it published on Kindle) was supposed to be done and dusted by September, and the various hitches/bad choices with regard to the cover design were just one aspect of the many hold-ups.  As ever sheer determination (ie. bloody-mindedness) wins the day, and The Designer proved to have insightful clarity when it came to interpreting the story in a visual way.

The Designer is Jade King at BlackInk Communication, and I gave her very little guidance of what I wanted, except that I felt it was important to reflect the dark tone of the story (so no pink and fluffy, no stock-teen-lit images of shoes and dresses) and I was happy to keep it clean and simple as this works best as a thumbnail image (Amazon’s stock-in-trade).

I also gave her the covers I like; the Gone series by Michael Grant, anything by John Green, and Ketchup Clouds, by Annabel Pitcher.  As you can see it’s all about creating a striking layout by combining colour with an effective font design.

So, after mulling over various ideas and fiddling around with the nitty gritty detail, I finally have my cover…

What I love about this is the simplicity of the image and the suggestion of sinking into darkness, The filled-in letters of the font add a further dark undertone, and there’s not a fluffy pink shoe to be seen.

I’m now in the process of planning a coffee-fuelled weekend with The Editor to bring everything together, and will be wrestling with document formatting, blurb writing, etc over the next couple of weeks.  The process of uploading to Kindle is sure to be a testing few days, but I’ve a feeling that after all the months of angst, wrong paths and uncertainty, there may be a Margarita or two at the end of it…