Anatomy of a Book Cover Revisited

When I first started writing, my former publisher encouraged me to work on a series. So, I started writing what would become The Darcy and Elizabeth Series that consisted of the following:

Attending a Ball

The Women of Longbourn

Darcy and Bingley

Darcy Chooses Part 1

Darcy Chooses Part 2

Elizabeth’s Choice

The first three are short prequels which were introductions or lead-ins to Darcy Chooses Parts 1 and 2. Darcy Chooses #1 and #2 needed covers. Unfortunately, from the beginning, we had nothing but trouble farming out the covers. First artist we hired was lousy, and the second was very talented but uncooperative.

So, I began designing my own covers and putting them together in Photoshop Elements which is an abbreviated and less expensive form of Photoshop. this gave me excellent results although I was a novice at it. At least the covers didn’t have the problems that we had when we used one cover for all the series.

A friend and I were playing with photoshop and elements one day, and she basically came up with a cover that I went with nine years ago (2016) when I put Darcy and Bingley and Darcy Chooses Parts 1 and 2 together in one volume to make Darcy Chooses – The Complete Novel.

Why did I choose this cover? Because it makes a great thumbnail. It stands out and is noticed. When Darcy Chooses – The Complete novel first published, it was #820 in the Kindle Store. Even with this blatantly non-Regency cover, this book was in the top 100 of two genres for months, two years later. I was almost afraid to change it. 😊 But my daughter and I began redoing all the covers in spite of the fact that I love what I came up with to go with Darcy Chooses brilliant orange cover. We decided to make some changes as the series needed Regency covers.

This is the cover we finally settled on in June 2022 for Darcy Chooses, and I am delighted with having a handsome Darcy to look at.

The first cover for Elizabeth’s Choice was not the current one, but I was delighted when I found the perfect cover for this fun honeymoon trip for Darcy and Elizabeth.

It was romantic, and it had a ship that went along with their trip to Ireland as well as having a lady included. So, the series was redone to complement Elizabeth’s Choice. That cover was easy as I bought it, and we added the titles and author name. But what about the other four?Elizabeth’s Choice had the theme of Darcy and Elizabeth’s honeymoon to Ireland. Easy peasy. However, The Women of Longbourn, although having a connection to the series, had a theme related to Elizabeth’s journal and her entries a se’nnight before the Meryton Assembly. How would we show the relationship to the series in the cover? The Darcy Versus Series was a lot easier in that regard as I’ll show you in a minute. In the meantime, we realized that building a cover with similar colors and having the same fonts with the title and author name in the same positions, or the same look, might give us what we needed. And, thus, Attending a Ball and The Women of Longbourn covers came about, and we were pleased.

Attending a Ball was the very first P&P variation I ever wrote. Even though it has been updated, I plan to update it again as my very first attempt at writing fiction was not a Nobel prize winner. BUT it was the leader of the band as the very first one to start out the Darcy Series, and I’m proud of it.

The Darcy Vs Series didn’t present the same problems that The Darcy and Elizabeth Series was presenting us. It was simpler and carried the thought of Pemberley, Darcy’s home and Elizabeth’s future home.

First of all, there was no series when I wrote Darcy Vs Bingley. That actually started out as a one-shot on FanFiction.net with only one chapter. I mentioned to the readers that I intended it to only be a one-shot and asked if they wanted more. They did, so I did more. In fact, this book shoved Elizabeth’s Choice out of the way and demanded to be written FIRST. So, it was published in the spring of 2017, and Elizabeth’s Choice was published in February 2018. After that I started working on Darcy Vs Elizabeth hopefully to publish in May or June 2018, but it actually published March 2020.

DVB centered around Caroline Bingley’s rabid pursuit of Darcy so she could become mistress of Pemberly. Darcy Vs Lady Catherine showed the lack of ethics and morality that Darcy’s aunt was willing to employ to guarantee her daughter Anne became mistress of Pemberley. Since Chatsworth has always been my idea of Pemberley, I used a painting by Marlow done in the late 1700’s and available in public domain. That helped me avoid the editorial pictures of Chatsworth that I couldn’t use for commercial purposes. Cropping portions of the painting and flipping the scene gave me what I wanted in a series look. Because of the more serious theme of DVLC, I had my daughter incorporate the tree as a type of threat to Pemberley which is what Lady Catherine turned out to be. We also used the tree similarly with Darcy Vs Wickham as Wickham wanted Darcy dead.

My daughter has also turned out to be a gem in getting different looks of the fonts that I’m really pleased with. It pays to have a techie in the family. 😊 And this is what the three Darcy Versus book covers look like with the fourth in the series, Darcy Vs Wickham.

Doing my own covers has been a challenge but has been great fun as well. And I love working with my daughter. Although both of us have strong personalities, we really work well together…to my surprise. 😊 And both of us are enjoying this adventure in writing and design.

If you are not as happy with the book covers that you are buying or having done, you might consider doing your own. It is very rewarding, and you can also get exactly what you want. OR  you might  contact me at GiannaThomasAuthor@gmail.com and see what we can work out together to your satisfaction.