Last month, I went to the RNA conference where there were many excellent talks. One of the talks I attended was on book covers. It was led by Stuart Bache, who is an expert cover designer. He offered to critique some covers that people had submitted. I sent in my cover for Snowed In. Stuart’s comments were:

The covers for small town romance have moved on a bit – here’s what the book covers in that genre have in common now:

• The countryside takes up the lower third of the cover. The sky makes up the rest.

• Interesting fonts, not always swirly ones, but always eye-catching.

• Seasonal elements or foliage around the edges and at the top to ‘frame’ the image.

• The author name is also in an interesting font and not always small. Sometimes it’s at the top of the cover, sometimes at the bottom.

He also suggested that I remove the banner behind the author name because it looks amateurish.

There was a lot more useful stuff in the talk. He’s an expert at what he does and his comments were insightful. So, I came home and spent some time trawling through Depositphotos trying to find the right sort of images to make covers that looked more like the covers I was seeing in the book charts right now.

This is where I ended up. If you wanted to try any of the books, just click on the cover and it should take you to a page that lets you choose your shop:

If you read on a device that’s not an Amazon one, I have news. I will be moving these books out of Kindle Unlimited and putting them on Apple, Kobo, Google Play Books etc over the next few months.