Any of you who pay attention to my rambles probably know that Jason and Lily is my personal favorite out of all the books I’ve written. But you might not know that, compared to the other books in the series, it doesn’t get a lot of love. Or at least not a lot of sales. Out of the entire series, it has the best overall rating on Amazon, and people who read it seem to really like it. But despite that fact, sales on J&L are sporadic at best. I’ve tried practically giving it away at 99 cents for a long time and the price change did not seem to make a difference. I’ve updated the cover once before to bring it more in line with the rest of the series, and that didn’t do much for it either. But I’ve had a stinking suspicion all along that the cover simply wasn’t good enough. I mean, I know it’s a prequel and all, but I don’t get why readers who want to read everything else in the series would not want to read the prequel that sheds so much light on things. So, yeah, I’m blaming the cover.
The original cover…
…was meant to look like Lily’s journal… because the book is Lily’s journal. That made a lot of sense to me, but it wasn’t very pretty or eye catching when it came down to it. It also wasn’t quite in line with the other books. Movin’ on.
The current cover…
…is OK. It goes with the series, and for me, it means a lot. I’m willing to admit, though, that prospective readers might not get the oranges (having not read the book yet). And I imagine if I were judging the book by its cover, I might wonder if it was about fruit farmers or something. Clearly Jason and Lily needed a makeover. I thought about this (and put it off) for a very long time. I meandered through a range of possibilities, bouncing them off Pol. Here’s what one conversation was like:
Me: How about sungoggles?
Him: Boring.
Me: Um… how about playing cards?
Him: Boring.
Me: A gun? Throw in a glass of whiskey.
Him: Also boring.
Me: …An alligator?
Him: How about an alligator wearing sungoggles drinking a glass of whiskey while playing cards?
We both liked the last idea, but, alas, where do you get an alligator who will do that kind of thing for cheap?
The thing that I eventually came to was that Jason and Lily needed to have Jason and Lily on the cover. I don’t usually like to put characters on my book covers because I know we all like to imagine them for ourselves. But this story is so much about people that it just needed to have them. That led to more ponderances about poses and so on and so forth, and I kept putting it off. Until… now. At long last, I have a cover for J&L that I think finally does the book justice. I am really over the moon with this cover, as I think it captures the heart of the story beautifully. So, without further ado… here it is. I hope you love it as much as I do.
JT
Love! It’s Perfect!
Kate
Thanks! I’m reallllly happy with it. 🙂
JMT
I am hoping my unanswered questions means there is the chance of another episode? Why did Nitro overreact so much to the Amazon attacks? Which side did Jenson take in the end? Did Matt come good?… Big sigh… No more binge reading for a while I guess.
Kate
Those are some excellent questions. And yes, there will be at least one more novel that will shed some more light on things. I’m working on the first novel in a spinoff series that takes place a few years after the end of Endgame. Originally, I intended the new series to focus primarily on a new cast of characters, and as for the ones we are familiar with, there would only be glimpses of them through the eyes of the new characters. But then the old characters went and wormed their way into it. They are very insistent, you know. So there will be more of them than I intended, but I really don’t mind.
Let’s see…. I don’t know if I’ll ever write Nitro’s backstory, so… he was enslaved by the Amazons, and he and Lozzi (and some others) made their escape together. Jenson sided with Eden. It’s mentioned in there somewhere that she was rallying the east coast. And as for Matt… I guess you’re just going to have to wait and find out. 🙂