Cover story…

Whats the old adage about judging a book by its cover?

Well with that in mind I am contemplating changing the cover design for Passing Place. The original cover was designed, due to a desire on my part to have a cover that matched the one for Cider Lane… Which in turn I changed from its original cover when I released Passing Place… Yes, you can question my logic at the time by all means…

So, the original ‘Apple’ cover of Cider Lane became ‘Girl in the sunset’ and the original Passing Place cover ( which it still has now ) was ‘Piano Keyboard’ because then my first two novels had the same cover theme, and would look right on a shelf next to each other. See logic, there was one…

But therein lays a problem, Cider Lane and Passing Place are two very different novels. While a lot of my readers have read both, they aren’t aimed at the same market. One is a contemporary ‘romance’ for want of a better word about a young woman who falls off the edge of society after a tragic accident. The other is sci-fi/horror/speculative fiction, set in a bar that has customers who hail from just about anywhere, and anywhen… ‘Girl in the sunset’ says what Cider Lane is about perfectly. ‘Piano Keyboard’ doesn’t tell you a great deal Passing Place, other than there may be a piano involved, spoiler alert, there is… Richard, the main character is a piano player who gets a job in the bar in strange circumstances, but all the same, it doesn’t tell you a great deal about the novel…

As I am having a bit of a procrastination, rather than editing ‘A Spider In The Eye’ I was messing about with the idea of changing the cover and having released my Novella ‘A Scar of Avarice a couple of months ago, which is a Passing Place/ Hannibal Smyth cross over novelette. It’s cover and the art I used for it (a picture of an actual steampunk bar in Prague) would actually make a lot of sense for Passing Place itself. So I mocked one up…