Oh man, it turns out I am truly TERRIBLE when it comes to updating this blog! This is why I haven’t set up an author newsletter – do I think it would be useful? Yes! Would I ever remember to send it out on any kind of regular schedule? NO.

Anyway, better late than never! At least my Instagram is kept up-to-date…

Without any further delays, I’m so thrilled to show you the new cover for Synthetica!

As mentioned in my previous blog post, this cover is everything I dreamed it would be – clean, modern, features a lot of pink, and just overall captures the beauty of Anais’ city. I had a lot of fun working with my design agency on this (who you can find at Design by Ark) – honestly, even though being an indie author is sometimes so hard, the fact you get to control the creative direction for every part of your book is also pretty damn cool.

My design brief to the agency was to basically the below:

• Have an icon as a main focus (think The Hunger Games)
• Be on a white or off-white background
• Each book in the series to have a different highlight colour
• Coding the books’ taglines subtly into the design

I also got to send them over some examples of book covers I liked – they also went away and did their own research into the YA market, but they said they were pleased I sent them my recommendations too, so they knew the kind style I was after.

I’ve finally managed to update Amazon with the new book cover AND update my author name (which is a story for another blog post), and I also got to do the cover reveal on Instagram, which I loved. My next task is to try and update the cover on Goodreads, and the other platforms I uploaded Synthetica to – however, I did try and update Goodreads a few weeks ago and I somehow managed to lock myself out of my own account by updating my author name…so that’s the next challenge to try and solve!! As for the other platforms – well, I have a confession to make – I’m gonna have to really dig deep back through my old blog and try and discover where exactly I uploaded it to, way back in 2015. I know for sure I uploaded it to iBooks and Smashwords, but I’m not sure about any of the others…anyway, once I find that out, I then have the whole lovely process of updating my author name again. Word of advice to any aspiring authors out there – make sure you choose your pen name before you publish! Don’t make the same mistakes I did!

Til next time (which will hopefully be next week, but who knows)

Z xx

What do you think of Synthetica’s new cover? If you’re an indie author, how do you find the cover design process? Do you do it yourself, or get a designer?