9 Days to Six Moon Summer: The Cover!

You guys have all seen the cover a million times by now.  Remember my series on how I designed it?

So I guess the cover is nothing special to anyone by now.  :)  But I wanted to talk about it a little bit since the release is coming up!

The main character of Six Moon Summer is Rylie, an awkward blonde girl with knobbly knees and a pale complexion.  Readers of the book have been quick to notice that the girl on the cover isn't blonde!  What the heck was I thinking?

Honestly, I couldn't find the perfect source photo to use on my cover.  There were no blondes that fit!  (And that I could afford, for that matter.)  I have resolved this issue for future covers-- I have an awesome camera and some photography equipment, so I'll be shooting my own models in the future.  But these circumstances came to me after I designed Six Moon Summer and had it circulating on the internet for promotional purposes.

When designing it, I decided it wasn't Rylie on the cover, but Cassidy, another prominent character in the book, and went on my merry way.  I mean, who cares, right?  It's just a book cover.

As it turns out, everyone cares!  Several readers and reviewers have complained that the cover model doesn't look like Rylie.  This was a huge shock to me, and a huge educational opportunity, too.  The details matter.  People will envision the models on the front of your book as the characters.  Since I've never cared about the looks of the cover models, I didn't think anyone else did either, but I was really wrong.

I'm going to leave this cover the way it is.  It's gotten around too much by now to change it.  But when I finish the series and print the collection, I will have a model that looks like Rylie.  I promise.