Advice for Indie Authors: You do judge a book by its cover part 2!

Last year I published a blog called You do judge a book by its cover! where I discussed the importance of a good front cover for your novel. One year on I decided to dig out all the nearly covers that didn't quite make the grade for my debut comedy book The Drought. 

I thought it might be nice to share these, all wonderfully designed by Jacqueline Abromeit at Pen Press, and feel free to leave your feedback as to which one was your favourite...

1. This was all a bit too James Bond for me and I was never too sure about the plaster!	2. I liked the desert idea so asked to have a guy running towards the woman...
3. Jacqueline wanted to try and brighten the cover up so she came up with this...	4. But we decided to tone it down a bit and tried the cover with a different woman
5. I'm not too sure what we were thinking with this one! Running out of ideas maybe!	6. So we went back to the original design and included all our favourite bits

Looking back over all the covers again, I still think I got it right. I remember how excited I was when I saw the design for the first cover, but I think that was because seeing the front cover for your own book starts to bring everything to life a bit more.

But I spoke to friends and on there advice agreed that the design didn't quite capture the tone of the story - it looked a bit like a thriller (minus the heart-shaped plaster of course!). The idea of having a man run towards the image or 'mirage' of a woman in the desert worked, and also looked quite comical.

We also added in some praise The Drought had been given by TV presenters Ortis Deley and Angellica Bell, and the 'Mike Gayle' quote on the front worked really well as it immediately told the reader that my book was in the lad lit or chick lit category.

Now over to you - what is your favourite cover?