OMG!!! SOMEONE HAS THE SAME COVER AS I DO!

When I want to buy a book the first thing that catches my eyes are the covers. The book might be great but without hooking covers I probably don’t give it a second look. I’ve also seen some reviews saying: “Don’t judge the book by its cover. The story was great but the cover…well, not so much”. Not a nice thing to hear, right? But how do you create covers that don’t cost a fortune but will hook the readers’ eyes? I used to pick my cover pics from iStockphoto and asked the designer to mix them, until I found one of my favorite pics on the cover of another author’s book. YAIKS!!! I was in panic. The best I could hope was that some of her readers would mix me with that very famous author and the worse scenario was to assume that some thought I had copied her cover and that was so not the case. We were just using the same place to buy our cover pics. I decided in that second that I would not use the much-used-everyone-can-buy-cover-model-pics ever again. I needed some of their background pics though, and couldn’t give up on them but the models…well that was another thing. But what then? I didn’t know any mouthwateringly handsome guys with six packs or breathtakingly beautiful girls…or that’s what I thought.

I started to ask around and the answer was closer than I thought. My dear friend offered her brother to my upcoming vampire book, my sister instantly said yes, when I asked if I could borrow her son to one of my shape shifter book and my neighbor suggested her son’s friend to the cover of my witch book. I was stunned. Just like that I had models for three upcoming books and what’s more important, I knew without a doubt that those covers would be unique.

So, I organized a photo shoot and my very talented daughter, Iida, took hundreds of photos of this young beautiful girl . I was very lucky as the model was very photogenic and it only took about half an hour to get the right picture. After that I sent the pics to the cover designer (No, I’m not so talented that I could create my own covers so, yes, I use someone who is. However, I always have a very clear vision of what kind of covers I want and of course I always have the final word).

This time it only took two tries before we both were happy with the cover. Sometimes it takes months to create a cover that will satisfy us both, but this time we were lucky. So here you go. I hope you like it!

Oh, and by the way, I took the cover pic of my book CLUB NUMBER FIVE with my iPhone. It’s two doors mixed together and they’re both in a same narrow, hidden alley in London…but I bet you can never guess which alley!

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