How many thrillers must there be out there in the world of books? How many must there be vying for your attention on Amazon Kindle, ibooks and all the other ebook stores? What makes a thriller stand out? Answer- it’s got to be the blurb and the cover. The cover has to be eye catching and inventive. If you’re lucky enough, you might have found a good and very cheap cover designer. What if you haven’t? Then, my fellow thriller writer, you are on your own. I’ve tried to do a cover myself before, but usually fail. I design one, and show it to my girlfriend and she shakes her head. She’s right, it’s rubbish. So, I ask my cover designer to come up with something. And Tony Glass never lets me down. He designed the covers for Murderson and Welcome To Killville, USA.
Tony’s next job will be designing a cover for my next ebook- UGLY THINGS. This will be more of a challenge, as it is not a thriller. It’s more part of the ‘literary’ gang. It’s just a story about a vain man who ends up disfigured by a skin infection and ends up trapped in a Cornish fishing village with a host of weird characters. So, what happens with the cover? I have no idea at this point, but I’m sure inspiration will strike- either me or Tony. Of course, it helps if the cover designer knows something about the book and had read some of it.
When my next thriller comes out, the follow up to Murderson and Spider Mouth, the designing will be a little, not much, easier. Something dark and foreboding will do it. Then comes the problem of the blurb- the last line of defence or is it attack? Those few lines that can make them buy your book or turn them off. Obviously the best thing to do is pick up a book similar to style to yours and see what the blurbs like. Mimic it, but talk about your own book. Then shuffle it around a bit and see what works and what doesn’t. I’m having trouble with the blurb for my book Welcome To Killville, USA at the moment. It’s because it’s not the sort of thriller I’m used to writing blurbs for, so it’s taken a lot more crafting. If you can’t write a good blurb that satisfies yourself, then you cannot expect anyone else to buy into it.
Best thing to do is sit down and mark down the major points of the book- maybe a word here and there and try and join them up. Who said book writing was easy? Not me. You work and work at a novel, and maybe write a few drafts and correct them…and then you have to get it ready and formatted for Kindle and Smashwords…and then you have to get the cover ready and the blurb. It’s never ending, because of after that, you have to go out there and sell your little echildren to the book buying world.
Will anybody like what I’ve written? Will anyone like the cover and be seduced by the blurb? There’s only one way to find out…UPLOAD IT.
Bye for now.
Welcome To Killville, USA available now from Amazon Kindle.