Hello and happy March, everyone!
The days are starting to warm up here in London, and we are losing our minds. The pubs down the road from our flat are packed from lunchtime with young, pale hipsters desperate for social gathering. It’s a great place for people-watching.
Have I finished Seen in Silverbridge book 3 yet?
Of course I haven’t! I’m about 90% of the way through the second pass of the draft. I love it too much—finishing would mean I’d have to say goodbye to it and move on, so I’m eager to elongate this part of the process as much as possible…
Alongside writing the new book, I’ve been working on redesigning the covers for the first two books (under their original names), You Heard It Here First and You Should Have Said, and I thought it would be fun to show you a peek behind the curtain of that process.
What was wrong with the old covers?
To be honest, the books didn’t really need new covers, but a consistent piece of feedback I’ve received since the release of You Heard It Here First back in May 2023 is that the covers didn’t fully capture the energy of the books. Here are the original covers:
They look great, right? I dig them.
The process of getting these covers made was lengthy and involved myriad decisions, which you can read a it more about in a previous post:
You CAN Judge A Book By Its Cover
Here’s a great image from that post which shows how many iterations of the cover we went through before settling on the final cover:
After receiving these original concepts, I went with the middle option and we went further into ideating:
Yeah. That’s a lot of work for the poor designer.
And now I’ve decided to full redesign the entire thing?!
So, why redesign?
Basically, the covers weren’t pulling in the right readership.
The readers of Seen are predominantly women who read quick, easy mystery books. And while the original covers ‘fit’ the tone of the book enough, they weren’t appealing to the type of reader who was more likely to give a new series a go on their Kindle, and that’s where the majority of my readers are.
When you think about mystery covers, there are a few different styles. I looked through Pinterest, Goodreads and Amazon to see what was doing well in the female-led mystery genres and found three clear types.
- Illustrated, vivid, quirky — popular with contemporary readers
- Handdrawn, busy, lipsticky — popular with Young Adult readers
- Dark, silhouetted, sans-serify — popular with voracious ebook readers
1. Illustrated, vivid and quirky
These books have bright covers with simple illustrations—they denote light, quirky types of books like these:
At first, I felt like this vibe fit the Seen series really well. I thought’ I’d experiment with some concepts myself. I spent hours collecting references and experimenting with AI images and Photoshop.
Here are some of my concepts:
I sent a bunch of my favourites some friends and the feedback was a clear:
Yeah, nah.
None of them excited me, either. As much as I would have loved my books to have a hip, contemporary cover, it just didn’t feel right. The Seen series is genre fiction. Women, amateur sleuth, mystery.
So, I moved on.
2. Handdrawn, busy, lipsticky
This style is popular among Young Adult books. It’s like this:
You know the vibe. Lots of red and white and faceless images of ‘victims’.
This time, instead of jumping in and ideating on my own, I talked to a friend who’s a designer. She gave me some great advice about making mood boards, finding the themes, and doing pencil-sketches of concepts before going digital.
After sketching a couple of dozen concepts, I came up with two main ideas—a dark one and a light one—and moved to Photoshop:
I put these two ideas on Instagram and held a poll, and the results were … inconclusive. 50-50. Neither of them felt like the book.
So, after resisting the final style of mystery books, I pushed myself to consider whether or not it could work for the Seen series…
3. Dark, silhouetted and sans-serify
Classic, right? Like … uninspiring. Middle of the road. When I look at these covers, I see dark, gritty, airport books. Is that what I’ve written?
From the very start, I’ve resisted aligning the Seen in Silverbridge series with this style.
But, after two years, I forced myself to consider it. After all, the Seen books are definitely mysteries. Luce, Huds, Rodney and Faven are amateur detectives, tracking down clues and trying to solve murder cases.
It fits.
No more running away from it.
As soon as I’d admitted it to myself, I felt a huge wave of relief. When you look at these sorts of covers, you know exactly what type of ride you’re in for. And if the author delivers on a winding, dark-but-often-comedic mystery story, then you feel fulfilled. I wanted to do that for my readership. Set up a promise, then fulfil it.
So, once again, I went back to the design process. And after more back and forth, ideating, criticising, and lamenting, and regrouping, I’ve ended up with a new style of covers that are much better fit for the books.
… and I’ll share them next time.
Read more with Part 2!