Coming up with a cover for The Killdeer Connection was no easy task.
I thought it might be interesting for readers and writers to see the process at work before I officially reveal my cover for the upcoming novel.
What I’ll do in this series of articles is analyze some book covers and tell you what I liked about them and why I ultimately rejected them.
In the first part of this series, you can see how I wrestled with having a killdeer on the cover. Click this link here to read that article.
As stated in that article, the overall goal for any book cover is to sell books. Along the way, I came up with two criteria to meet that goal:
(1) It has to mix in with other covers in the genre but it has to stand out at the same time.
(2) The cover has to convey the real story in a compelling way that connects with the reader.
So with that in mind, let’s look at my next attempt to create a cover.
Since the winner in my first article attempt was a killdeer with a swampy, green background, I wanted to compare it with something new. In this case, I thought that since the novel had an oil industry setting, perhaps this was something worth exploring in the form of a cover.
Wrong!
You can see the results of a blind poll below where that cover attempt lost by a wide margin: 62% to 38%. People thought the oil cover was boring and the topic turned some people off. Read the comments below.
Looking back, I should have known better. People are attracted to animals over things. Put up a puppy photo on facebook, and it will ring up a bunch of likes. Put a puppy next to a pumpjack and there’s no contest.
But I still thought something was missing in the bird cover. The killdeer cover didn’t convey anything much about the story. Many people don’t know that a killdeer is even a bird so the title wasn’t helping out the cover. More importantly, the cover didn’t convey a human element to the story or that it was a legal thriller. So I went in that direction next and I’ll cover that experience in part three of the series. (Spolier: I was wrong again!)
Tom Swyers is an attorney, judge, and the award-winning author of Saving Babe Ruth, the prequel to the David Thomson Lawyer Series. His upcoming legal thriller, The Killdeer Connection, is the first book in the David Thompson Lawyer Series. It’s about a lawyer who must battle the fracking industry before it kills him and his family. Sign up to join the readers group to keep up to date by clicking this link here .
