Nothing Serious Last New Cover

Cover art.  Yes.  Important?  It must be.  It's the first introduction the reader has to the book.

Like store brands.  Walmart, Stop & Shop, Best Whatever.  They used to be basic, rudimentary and fairly ugly.  Then something happened and these stores hired graphics designers to compete with Campbell's Soup.  The brand has to be identifiable and pleasing without opening the can to see the contents. 

And yet there are books with not so pleasing covers that sell and books with wonderful covers that don't.

Cover art on ebooks is rapidly becoming more sophisticated.  I can honestly say I don't want to change this one again.  But maybe in 2 years, all book covers will be animated and I'll have to find a way to have this woman raising and lowering the flowers to her nose.

Nothing Serious is still a cute story no matter what the cover is.

New Nothing Serious Paperback

When I originally published Nothing Serious, I did a paper version.  I reformatted it and rebuilt the cover.  This is the wrap-around cover for the paper book. 

If that's all I'd done this week I would think myself a slacker!  Hopefully there will be fewer demands on my time next week and I can return to Bittersweet Farm 4.

Nothing Serious #99 Overall!

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #6 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction

I would like to thank all those people who, for whatever reason they may have had, downloaded Nothing Serious this week.

And I immediately got a review complaining that there was nothing serious about it.

Lots of fun!

Nothing Serious Freebie-O-Rama!

Nothing Serious, my screwball comedy will be free at Amazon tomorrow.  Paige battles an internet addiction and identity theft, deals with someone who invents thick water, avoids zoning board jail and falls deeply in love with the blue-eyed antiques dealer next door, Jonathan Macklin, even if he doesn't trust her as far as he can throw his Majorelle cabinet.

I realized it had been put in Select and I never did anything with it.  My 90 days are up at the end of the month so I needed to act quickly.  Much like Paige acted quickly, I started to make as many arrangements as I could but I'm not yanking my DSL wire out of the wall.  I'm not nuts!

Nothing Serious Two Part Interview

My romantic comedy Nothing Serious interview with Honey Bee Reviews Part 2  http://bit.ly/WpCR98
Yesterday there was Part 1.  Today Deb and I finished up with Part 2.  You can't ask for more attention than that.   Thank you, Deb.  And I loved all the images used.  That's a girl after my own heart.

I'm coming to think that an interview may be just as good as a review.  They're easier to get and to be absolutely honest, you are able to speak for the book.  You're in control of the publicity.  The drawback is, of course, that the interview only appears on the blog so you're dependent on how many people you reach.  The upside you don't have the risk of  a reviewer not understanding or not liking the book and having that possibly not so accurate vision on Amazon until the sun goes supernova.

Will a rave review bump sales?  Probably.  Will a good interview bump sales?  Maybe.  If you were in sparkle mode.  Either way the interview will be available for a good long time and will turn up in a Google search,

There's some kind of Madison Avenue equation for how many times a potential customer has to be exposed to a product before they buy it.  10?  20?  I don't remember the number but the point is you and your books are the product.  You have to expose this product to the potential customers and it will take more than once.  A lot more.

Nothing Serious

Most of us who enjoy old movies love screwball comedies.  My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby, and Palm Beach Story come to mind.  Ridiculous situations with perfect scripts and wonderful actors who made it all work.  I don't think we have the knack for it anymore.

My novel, Nothing Serious, is a tip of the hat to those movies.  It's a ridiculous situation--a young woman lives her life through the internet (that's not so unbelievable!) and one day after being the victim of identity theft, Paige rips the connections out of the wall and leaves the city for a rural town.  They're nuttier than she is.  She's almost thrown in Zoning Board Jail for painting her store, Nothing Serious, colors that are too bright.

Avalon probably would have bought it but it was just when I was getting into indie publishing and I wanted to do it myself.  It's had a couple of titles and several different covers.  I like this one.  The argument would be "This illustration is from 1920!"  Yes, it is.  And there's a party in the book where everyone dresses up in Jazz Age style.  So maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.  Maybe Montlake will publish it and give it a different cover.  Otherwise in 6 months or a year, I'll give it a new cover!

For anyone interested in the process, I tried to content aware fill out the young man standing underneath her.  I can't make that function work in Photoshop so I clone stamp tooled him out, then eventually also removed the background/hills.  In Adobe Bridge Camera Raw, I improved the colors, employed clarity, brighten, saturation, sharpen, bumped the black.
In Photoshop I added a luminance because the image is deteriorating with age and I wanted to soften or smooth it out a little.  I used the dodge tool to lighten up some sections.  The title is a font called Gatsby and my name is in Minion Pro.