Dean | The Online Home of Author Dean Murray

Update: I’ve got quotes picked out for all of the books, but I haven’t managed to get a hold of all of the reviewers in question, so if you want to try and bump one of the quotes with something you provide you’re welcome do so 🙂

Books that I know I absolutely won’t be changing:

Bound, Driven, Lost, Hunted. Everything else could potentially see some changes before everything is said and done.

Here’s the latest mockup for the new Torn print cover:

Arriving at a cover concept for a now series is always a very difficult process for Katie and me.

The cover for any given series needs to look good as a thumbnail, feature my name prominently, and convey the genre so that readers get what they were expecting when they open the book up.

That would be tough enough all by itself, but Katie and I are both also long-time readers and sometimes a concept that looks fine when evaluated in a vacumm will get vetoed because it reminds of something else that we read back when we were teenagers.

We knew when we decided to re-brand the Reflections series earlier this year that it was going to be a lot of work, but we didn’t expect it to take this long to arrive at a wrap around cover we both liked.

Two days ago Katie put the finishing touches on this piece of art and I thought we were there until we realized that quote at the top (Intense, Violent and Intriguing) is actually for Bound rather than for Torn. Dang it.

If you blow up the cover you can see that the middle contains a couple of other reviews about The Reflections Series (it should read Reflections Universe). That’s a trick that publishers use when they have a really good quote about one book in a series that they want to use to sell another book in the series. In our original version of the cover, all three of the reviews (called pull-quotes in publishing speak) were down in the middle of the cover, which worked because we’d attributed them to the Reflections Universe.

We can’t do that if we pull a quote up to the top though–it needs to be about the book the cover belongs to. So the back half of this cover works for Bound, but not for Torn.

I really like the layout Katie has put together here, and I’d like to use it for the rest of the books in the Reflections Universe (the blurbs and pull quotes will obviously change some from book to book) so I’d like to ask for help from those of you who want to see each of the Reflections & Dark Reflections books reissued in print with new covers.

We need pull-quotes that will work for the top of the print books, separate pull-quotes for each of the books other than Bound. The perfect pull-quote will be 2-5 words so that it will fit at the top of the cover at a similar size to what you see in the Torn mockup. If you think you have the perfect review though and it needs to be bigger, don’t let that stop you. Katie could always do 3 words on one line really big and then a follow-on sentence in much smaller text to round out the quote. Just remember, the best pull quotes are really punchy/short.

If you’re willing to help out and don’t mind having your name on the back of one of my books for at least the next several years, please leave your reviews here in the comments to this post, one review per comment, being clear which book you’re reviewing.

If I use your quote, then once I’ve got the final proof from the printer, I’ll sign it and send it to you (anywhere in the lower 48 United States–sorry international shipping is brutal).

Bonus points if once you’ve written your review you copy it over to Amazon 🙂

A big thanks in advance to everyone who’s going to help out!

-Dean