When You Can't Decide on a Front Cover for Your Book

Over the last few months, in between trying to get  Pioneers in the Mountains of Mexico published, I have been editing and editing and making decisions about my own book, Roses in Kiev, stories from the year I taught English in Kiev before Jonathan and I got married. It is our love story combined with many details about life in Ukraine just after the Iron Curtain fell, just a few years after the Chernobyl disaster. I have spent many hours trying to come up with the right photo for the front cover. Here are just a few samples of some Jonathan and I tried.

This one above is one where I dressed up in a Ukrainian costume I have saved all these years. I just loved the photo, but it was too busy for the front cover, not enough empty space for lettering of the book title.

Jonathan brought me home more than one beautiful bouquet of roses at least three times as we tried again and again to figure out the cover photo.

This one was taken with a single rose over a Ukrainian mother-of-pearl jewelry box that I have saved all these years. We decided it was too dark, and while it looks Ukrainian, it really didn't have what we were looking for.

                    Needless to say, I couldn't use this one as I look entirely too old!!  :) :)

                                                              Another try that failed.

 We felt like we were getting closer with this one.

 

  I liked this one pretty well, but the white texture was too bumpy. And it didn't really have anything to it that gave it a Ukrainian look or anything romantic.

We tried the roses every which direction on various backgrounds, and it just didn't work.

     This was a really good one but the photo would not come out clearly, and the roses were too low.

This one was nice, but entirely too busy. Some of these pictures, I thought I may use inside the book instead of on the cover. We'll see.

          This photo was one of my favorites. Maybe I will have it inside the book in the chapter where Jonathan gives me my first bouquet of roses!

                                                

This was getting closer to what we wanted. It included a rose, a photo of us (romance) and a Ukrainian scarf draped behind us which gave the Ukrainian look. 

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                                                      This one was very, very close.

                                   And one very similar to this one is what we finally chose.

A LOT of work goes into not just writing and editing a book, but also into the photography for the cover and the mug of the author. You have to organize the contents, write an acknowledgments page, an introduction and foreword, sometimes an epilogue, and a back cover write-up, as well as a blurb about the author. So it will have been nearly two years since I started working on this book before it is done.