The advice, if you’re publishing independently, is to do it as professionally as possible.
So, professional book edit, book cover and marketing plan.
I have the excellent Emily Pedder of The Book Edit www.thebookedit.co.uk to thank for the first two. Not only is she a fantastically helpful and insightful editor, but she also put me in contact with Simon Avery of nicegraphicdesign.co.uk who came up with the terrific cover design.
It was a great exercise to write a proper cover design brief, and think long and hard about what it needed to project. Very useful for making me focus on genre, themes, and the implications for future cover designs (as it turns out Like Me is the first book in The Millingham Series).
Simon produced a few options with different typefaces, graphics, colour palettes. The overhanging tree was originally suggested for book two, but suits the story of book one better. Which is how we came up with this:
