Match to Love is almost ready. A couple days ago I sent the final manuscript to my editor and now I’m waiting for her comments. Once this last editing pass is done, my book will be ready to go out into the world. I’m anxious, nervous, but excited at the same time. By August, I’ll have the book I’ve been working on for over a year in my hands and hopefully in the hands of lovely readers like you.
I figured this was the perfect moment to share with you the cover. I’ve had it ready for a while now but was waiting to reveal it until the book was closer to release. I’m thrilled with how this cover turned out but it was a long road to get to this final image. I tried different ideas from the start, pretty much anytime I wanted to take a break or didn’t feel like writing or editing that day I would work on the cover. I made at least four versions before settling on this one, which I love.
I want to share with you part of that process.
My first step was looking at other book covers, mostly romance and lesfic, for some inspiration. In the end, illustrated covers were my favorite, so I decided I wanted mine to be illustrated too. I also had a very punctual scene from the book in my mind that I thought would look great as the cover if I could find someone to draw it or designing using stock images.
These three were some of my favorite covers while I researched. I’d have loved to have something done in the style of You Had Me At Hola or 40-Love but paying for that kind of custom illustration was out of my budget.
I also researched the covers used by lesfic books with a tennis theme. These are clear on the tennis imagery but as I looked for potential stock pictures I could use similar to these I couldn’t find one that really spoke to me so I stuck with my original plan of going illustrated.
Armed with my Photoshop skills, I started experimenting. My basic idea was to use a big and nice font for the name of the book and add small elements that referenced moments of the story. These are all really bad, but they were the starting point.
I used elements like a tennis ball, references to travel and to cities mentioned in the book. As you can see the name of the series here was different, but I decided to change it because it mentioned the Olympics until I found out everything that has to do with the Olympics, including using the word, is trademarked. I rather avoid any potential issue and changed the name of the series.
Again, I wasn’t happy with these, so I keep looking for ideas and for images I could use, until I found a perfect stock graphic with a tennis racket and a heart. I played with that image and different fonts until I made what I was sure was going to be my cover.
I was pretty happy with this version. It had the reference to tennis that I wanted. The color and heart showed it was romance. I’d found a font I liked and that highlighted the name of the book.
I kept this version as my cover for several months, but there was one thing bothering me. In most of the lesfic books you see on amazon the cover includes a woman, or two. I wanted to make clear this book is a lesbian book with a female main character.
So my search started again. Every other day I would try to find an image of a woman that could complement the cover. Until I did and with a few tweaks here and there, I mixed it with my latest design for what I think it’s an amazing cover. Sometimes I still feel like it could be better, but that’s just the perfectionist in me talking.
Without more preamble, I present you the cover for Match to Love.
