The new covers are in! Time for me to stock up on author copies for book fairs and summer markets! The new edition of "The Pack: The Dare and The Draugar" also has a new preview page. At the end is a slice from the first chapter of the second book in "The Pack" series: "The Crow and The Curse." Working on it right now! Read "The Pack: The Crow and The Curse" preview here. *If you haven't been keeping up with me on Instagram or Threads, there are two reasons behind the new cover design. 1. I needed to put the gold medal graphic on the cover - it's the "Gold Seal of Excellence" that "The Pack: The Dare and The Draugar" won from the Mom's Choice Awards in 2023. No. 2 is a slightly more complicated reason.
I'm an Indie Author, which means that when you buy one of my books on Amazon, Amazon prints out a copy for you. Bookstores order copies of my books through IngramSpark, usually in batches of about 5 at a time. Then IngramSpark prints out the books on demand.
"The Pack: The Dare and The Draugar" came out in April 2021 on Amazon, and in May 2021 it was available to bookstores via IngramSpark. A few months before "The Dare and The Draugar" came out, another indie author published the first book in HIS series. It turns out, in addition to both of us writing books for middle graders, we both started out as journalists. And we both obviously love trees. And forests. And enchanted forests. And...we both chose the same piece of stock art from iStockphoto.com to create our covers.
We'd never met each other, or read each other's books. A friend sent me a link to his Amazon page and his cover in 2022. I almost fell over when I saw it. He published his book in 2020, before mine, and his main character is a middle school boy, "Casey Grimes." I sent him an email joking about the perils of stock art. He emailed me back, agreeing. We swapped books. I read his and went, whew. They're completely different, except for the idea of magic things happening in a forest. Since there are one or two other books featuring enchanted forests [ ;) ], I figure I'm OK. So when I needed to put the Mom's Choice Awards gold seal on my cover, I decided to create an entirely new cover that would look completely different, and didn't use stock art. I gave AI a try, and the result is the new cover - which features the redwood forest that surrounds Camp Coho, the railroad tracks for the train that makes a couple of appearances in "The Dare and The Draugar." Front and center is MacUmba, everyone's favorite shape shifting Guardian Hound. (Scruffy little terrier the size of Toto one moment, giant Irish Wolfhound when danger strikes.) And if you look closer, you can see a couple other creatures too. Expect the cover from "The Pack: The Crow and The Curse" to have a similar look and feel when it comes out, hopefully in April 2025. (Just in time for some summer camp reading.) Join The Pack mailing list to keep up with news on "The Crow and The Curse." Thank you for reading it!