Meredith Mansfield, Author

As I work my way toward completing the revisions to “The Music Box”, I have to start thinking about the next step: a cover. I’m not in a position to pay for a cover designer–at least not yet–so this is something else I have to do for myself. Hopefully, I’m getting better at it.

The cover is critically important. It’s the first impression a reader has of the book. A poor cover understandably makes them question the quality of the work inside. You can see my first two covers over in the sidebar.

The cover for “Heart of Oak” is based on a photo of mine. No issues about copyright, there. But it’s not a great cover. It’s busy and, besides that, it just looks like a blob in gray scale. Most e-readers are black and white. I hadn’t learned to take that into consideration when I did that cover. At some point, I’m going to have to redo it.

The cover for BLOOD WILL TELL is better. It’s based off of a couple of very old engravings. It works well in gray scale, but there’s still something about it. Maybe it’s the background. At some point, I’ll have to redo it, too.

So, now I’m working on the cover for “The Music Box”. Actually, I’ve been working on this for a while, but none of my ideas have worked out. Let’s face it, a picture of a music box is pretty boring.

I think, however, that I may have finally hit on something that will work. This is still very much a work in process. The color is less than half done–and may change without warning. There’s a lot of clean up needed. This will give you an idea what it might look like.