Last night during my typical bout of insomnia, I did some brainstorming about the books, the covers, titles, etc. I’m now gonna call the first book Escaping Fate. The second one will be Rebooting Fate. It makes more sense, I think, given how the master volume is broken up. Here’s a cover for the series debut:

I’m trying to keep the variety of colors on the cover to a minimum, per current wisdom. But I plan to change the font color with each installment, so that will become a bigger and bigger challenge as the series goes on.

Been doing some research on cover design in the time travel genre. There is some diversity there. If it’s more literary, serif fonts are used. Time travel romance uses fancier serif fonts–sometimes even script. Both of those offshoots use warmer colors in the art and font. The rest of the genre uses thin sans serif fonts and a cool or cold color scheme.

My “artist” chose cold colors, so that’s what I’m working with. I did the first cover concept with one of the comic book fonts I bought.  It was kind of like the common sans serif fonts but informal, and I made it thicker for the title text. I wanted it to help convey that this is not any of the existing genre mixtures. It’s not hard science fiction, overly technical, or chick-lit time travel. Also far from safe and uncontroversial. So the font was a little risky, like the story itself. At least, that was my rationale.

Got some advice from an online friend and tried something else–what you see above.

To show how awful I am at marketing, it didn’t even occur to me to plug myself for my bestsellers, until it was suggested to me (thanks, MM). Well, duh. That should have been a no-brainer. It really does make a difference for many readers–the whole bandwagon approach to advertising is what bestseller lists came out of.

For those of you who are not authors, I’ll let you in on a secret: Most people who graduate high school never crack a book voluntarily for the rest of their lives. When you meet such people and they find out you are published, the first question out of their mouths is not what you write about, but whether you’ve written any bestsellers. They might never buy your book. They might never try to read it. But they definitely won’t if you’re not a bestselling author. If they have a passion for, say, horse racing, and Author A has written a novel about horse racing while Author B has written a novel about a retarded Serbian prostitute…which is a bestseller…then it’s not even a contest. Off into the world of retarded Serbian prostitution they go!

The latest advice is to use one other font for about half the text on the page. I think I’ll experiment with that, too. So this probably won’t be the final version.