Photos » Book Covers - The Merry Bell SeriesThis Album represents the covers for the mystery series featuring PI Merry Bell.Livingsky Book Cover 202352681718967_7b7b547f85_cLivingsky Temp CoverThis was the cover I created for the book as a placeholder before we could create an official cover. It also served as a bit of an inspiration. I like the simplicity of it, the true blue Saskatchewan sky (photo from our acreage).First cover attemptAlthough there were aspects of this cover I appreciated, overall I did not like it. I hated having to admit this to the publisher. It made me sad because I know how skillful our cover designer is, and she indeed had taken many of my suggestions into consideration. I’d proposed the idea of using puzzle pieces (as in solving a mystery) and fire (part of the storyline). But looking at the resultant image, all I could see were flaming gummy bears falling from the sky. Each puzzle piece had its own imbedded “sky” image (cool idea), but they were much too small to make out. Mostly, it was the use of the woman’s profile I did not agree with. Only once in 12 books have I used a character image on a cover. I much prefer leaving it up to readers to conjure up their own idea of what characters look like. To my mind, this image looks more like it should be on the cover of a romance novel, maybe one about the ill-fated relationship between two gummy bears who…are on fire? Long story short, the team at Stonehouse Publishing agreed it wasn’t quite right and our excellent cover designer hit it out of the park with the new cover.
