PREPARING DEATH LINE FOR EPUBLICATION

Death Line is the third of the out of prints in my Rafferty & Llewellyn humorous mystery series that I'm publishing as an ebook. I've just reread it while I was adjusting the format after its conversion from an Amstrad disc and it strikes me as more serious than the other books. Its plot is also far more complicated. Whether those are good or bad things....

Anyway, I've just sent the book over to America to my ebook formatting lady, Kimberly Hitchens. If any of you are looking for a reliable and reasonably priced formatter for your ebooks you could do worse than use Hitch's services. You can contact her at hitch@Q.com. This is also the third of mine that Hitch will ready for epublishing. I'm looking forward to working with her again.

Although I've selected a photo from iStockPhoto.com for use as the basis for the cover, I thought I'd experiment a bit myself, just in case I could save myself a bit of money. I decided, because the book's called Death Line with a murder centred around a New Age business that deals in hand analysis (palm reading) and astrology, I thought I'd have a picture of a human hand with blood following the curve of the Life Line (to symbolize death). I also used a black cloth and pix of astrological symbols. What do you think? The one below is probably my best shot.

I tried to cut my own hand to get some blood, but apparently we have a houseful of blunt knives! Certainly none of them would cut your throat to oblige you. So I had to resort to other means. I didn't have any tomato ketchup, so I used tomato puree. Then I tried red nail polish. Nothing if not inventive!

Each time I set my props up, got the tomato gunge on my hand, took the shots, then cleaned up and put everything away, my husband complained there was this wrong with it or that wrong with it. So I did it again. Four attempts later...

Well, I thought it was pretty good for a book cover. Not too cluttered, limited colour palette, stark. Though Rick Capidamonte, who does my jacket graphics wasn't as impressed as I'd hoped. So we're going with the picture I first thought of from iStockPhoto with Rick adding various elements to the basic hand picture. I really like it. I love the colours and think it's pretty striking. What do you think of it?

Have you ever attempted to do your own book cover? Tell us about your experiences and if the experts rejected your brave attempts as they did mine or if you went on to use it in an actual publication. Put a link in your comment so we can see what you did.