Page 41 of Unexpected You
“Question: is there a way to combine these three and make something new?”
I nodded. “I have more control over my covers than other authors. If I tell Sylvia what I want, she can get them to make it happen.”
Cadence squinted at the covers. “I wish I had the raw files because I could do a mockup for you in a few minutes.”
“I can see if they’ll send them to me.”
She waved me off.
“No, I’ll ask them and see what happens.” I hit Reply on the email and typed out what Cadence and I had come up with, asking if Sylvia could do her shark thing and get them to at least do a mockup for me.
Email sent, I looked back at Cadence, who was still looking at the covers with her head tilted to the side.
“I miss when they used to have those romance covers with the shirtless guys and the women in ball gowns and like, a horse rearing in the background.”
I snorted. “I don’t exactly write those kinds of books. And those covers are kind of out of style for this era. But…” I trailed off. “Hold that thought.”
I headed to the library and it took a few minutes to find the books I was looking for and I brought back a stack in my arms.
“Whoa, what’s that?” she asked, and I deposited them on my desk. A few of the paperbacks fell onto the floor.
“Oh my god,” she said, holding up a book with a shirtless man on the cover holding a woman in a gown. There was a horse in the background, but it wasn’t rearing. Just there. “This is majestic.”
Her eyes lit up as she went through the rest of the books.
“These are all incredible. I’m in love.”
Cadence stacked them back up on the desk in two neat piles.
“Those are treasures.”
“They are,” I agreed, leaning back against my desk. There were about five thousand things I should be doing right now, but here I was, looking at book covers with Cadence.
“I’ve been collecting them here and there. I watch auctions and wait for my favorites to come up.”
Cadence perched on my desk, swinging her legs back and forth.
“That’s so cool. I collect foreign editions of my favorites.”
“Show me,” I said, instead of telling her that we should get back to work.
Hopping up, she got her phone and did a few searches before showing me.
“So often the US covers are just so boring and then you see what Poland gets and it’s like oh shit, should I move to Poland?” she said, leaning over my shoulder as she flipped through different lovely covers. Many of them were for sapphic romances and featured two women in various positions.
“Book covers are so subjective, but I’ve had to fight to not have some really bad ones. Especially at the beginning. They’d give me these bad stock image couples that didn’t look anything like my characters, and I couldn’t understand what they were thinking.”
Cadence leaned away and I almost missed the smell of her immediately. She tucked her phone away and went to sit at her chair, but she pushed it over to my desk.
“Have you ever thought about not working with a publisher? Doing it on your own? That’s a whole thing now.”
I shook my head. “Not really. I mean, I would, if I didn’t have such a good team behind me.” Sylvia would still work with me if I decided to publish on my own, but then I’d need editors and cover designers and a publicist and even thinking about hiring all those people made me feel like I was bringing on a migraine.
“Makes sense. You’d probably have to do even more work than you do now, and that’s already a lot.”
It was. Some days I wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to quit and volunteer at the library or something. But then I started to panic, thinking about giving up the money from those advances and the royalty checks and I knew that wasn’t for me. I could barely go on vacation as it was, let alone have my entire life be a vacation.
“Speaking of that.” She twisted back and forth in her chair. “I should probably get back to what I was doing.”