I’ve got it covered!

It’s taken ages to get the cover of my next book sorted, I knew so clearly what I wanted but couldn’t find the right image and then had various technical difficulties to add to the frustration. Because I’m self publishing on Amazon KDP I use their templates for creating the cover and obviously they are quite limited and it’s difficult to adjust them.

This was the cover for my last book, Saltpans:

I wanted a similar style for my new book Winterdyke; the novel is set during a terrible snowy two weeks when everything is under a blanket of white and dull skies above. Trees were black silhouettes, cloaked in snow, there’s a frozen mere with icy spikes of rushes and sedges everything ice-bound. I have a few snowy photos but there needed to be a pale space which would be on the back of the book where i could fit a blurb, or a dark space where i could have the text in white or yellow. None of my pictures fitted that.

Then I remembered my daughter had been in the States for a year and she had experienced the sort of conditions I had imagined for my characters and I trawled through her pictures. I found one, which although didn’t quite portray the scenes I had in mind, certainly gives a dull, dire, foreboding snow covered landscape. The trees aren’t quite the threatening sentinels but they stand as if on guard, as if trapping my main character, Thomas Radwinter. In the story he is indeed trapped – he’s been commissioned to research the family history of an immensely wealthy family, but of course all is not as it seems!

My featured image is the photo I’ve used for Winterdyke, I’ll share the image of the cover when it’s ready!