I love book covers and I cannot lie

 One of my favorite things about being an indie author (and I've been traditionally published) is hat you have control over what your cover looks like. In trad publishing, even heavyweights like King and Patteson don't have that much say. But as an indie, you can have exactly the cover you want. (That doesn't prevent a lot of indie covers from being awful, but you could say that about a fair number of trad published books as well.)

A cover will make me want to pick up a book. The cover of Mexican Gothic, for example, is so beautiful it looks like a piece of art I want to put on my bookshelf facing out. (It's a wonderful book, but that cover is what snaggedme.) If ou haven't seen it, I urge you to look it up. I couldn't post the cover because it's protected by copyright, and I couldn't. 

When I started publishing 11 years ago, you could buy a lot of covers for under $50.  There were a couple of designers who specialized in inexpensive covers. They all used the same photo sources--Deposit Photo, Shutter Stock, Dreamstime--so you started to see the same faces over and over. (I have the same model on several books. His name is Gunther, and his images are up at a site called Period Images. Another of their models, Karl, is on a couple other books. 

Prices have gone up, but you can still snag some bargains if you cruise the sites. The one I use most often is Book Cover Design. They have tons of designs and one of the things I like about them is that they don't accept covers that use AI-generated images. I've seen a lot of posts touting how writers can make their own covers quickly and freely using sites dedicated tojust that. Right now, honestly, they mostly look awful but in a few months, who knows? (This is different from covers using characters that designers have patiently created on their own.) But the way AI images are created involves a kind of "sampling" from other images, that are the property of the designers who created them. In other words, depending on how you look at it, it's sketchy or it's stealing.  

Designers have to make a living too. Both my mother and my sister were artists. They made a living from their commercial art (working for department stores and thelike). I would hate to think that someone was stealing their art. (Piray of books is also a huge issue. I've seen my work on pirate sites. A lot of people say, well--I don't have the money to buy your book. Except, they're mostly all on KU, so you could spent $10 and get thousands of books for free. And don't tell me you don't spend at least ten dollars a month buying fancy coffee.Onw of my books has been downloaded so much that if I actually got royalties, I could actually cover my monthly expenses with my writing.) But I digress. We were talking about covers.

I have stockpiled a lot of covers, which turned out to be a good investment when prices started going up. A lot of designers I bought when they were just starting out are now in the $200-$300 range per cover. But there is one drawback. Styles in covers change and what looked like an awesome cover back in the day looks hopelessly dated now. Or you bought covers for a series you planned and now find yourself writing in another direction. (I have a number of covers for horror stories and I don't really write those that often.)

And because I have so many covers, I keep vowing that I'm not going to buy any more unless they fit a story I have that's written but needs a cover.  And mostly I stick to that. But when I saw that Kimberly of KDS Cover Concepts had a fantastic sale on her covers, I just had to snag this one. The cover instantly suggested a story I can fit into my Ostrander Witches series and it was just so cute and playful. And the price was absolutely right. I bought it as  birthday present for myself and I'm well pleased.