Perhaps this news doesn’t require an exclamation point.

But it’s taken an amazing amount of time and effort to get a workable cover up and running for my new book, The Rabbit Skinners, so I do feel rather a surge of exuberant accomplishment. I’ve worked through three versions, all fashioned on Canva. The first cover was okay, but featured an image whose origins, and therefore legality, and couldn’t determine (I tried!), so after many hours of lovingly crafting the thing, I threw it away.

The second cover used a photo from Canva’s library, and it was sort of okay, but became far too “pixelated” when I uploaded it to Amazon and looked cheesy and unprofessional (although I tried to convince myself that the huge pixels looked kind of “artsy” and “symbolic” of the way the kidnapped girl in the novel was treated by society…in the end, a bunch of rubbishy rationalization). I went through seven attempts to reconfigure the photo and make the pixels not so gapingly noticable (and to get the girl’s skin looking somewhat normal), but to no avail. The second version also had no frame, a condition which, given much of the space comprisng it is white, caused the thumbnail on Amazon to become disappearingly small by comparison to the other books on display.

The third, and I hope final, version of the cover features an image of substantially higher resolution licensed from a stock photo site, 123RF.com. Using this image, I can legally sell up 500,000 copies of my novel before having to upgrade the license. Since I don’t anticipate selling more than a dozen, I’m probably safe. I also figured out how to put a frame on it.

What do you think of the new cover?

My gloomy prediction about its possible sales does not in any way reflect on the book’s potential worthiness as a work of mystery-suspense fiction. It could be that The Rabbit Skinners is an historically fine, thrilling, captivating novel, or it could be a soul-sucking piece of digital manure (I imagine it’s somewhere in between).

You can decide for yourself! It’s available on Amazon even as I type, linked below, although it will for a few more hours still have the older photo affixed to its digital cover!

(You might understandably be wondering about the featured image for the post. I couldn’t really think of anything, so I just stuck on a picture of the actor Franklin Cover, who starred in television’s The Jeffersons many many many years ago. He also played an FBI agent in the now-forgotten 1988 movie, Zits).

I hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year’s, and sincere wishes (despite virtually all news suggesting it will be the opposite) for a peaceful and prosperous 2018!