E- Covers - a dilemma!

Having 'polished' the story line of Fated Encounters I decided to give the cover a make over as well. I contacted my designer with the usual brief "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it." and over the course of a few day's we traveled many paths unsuccessfully. Ultimately she felt it landed on my shoulders to decide which aspects of the book I wanted to portray as the writer, and I felt that she, as a reader, was better qualified to decide on the more appropriate cover. This has become the usual course of events for us.

We did the whole 'Single rose, two champagne flutes, and all that spotlight stuff, but we both agreed that it was far too cliche - I would class Fated Encounters as being a Romance/Tragedy with a host of other things chucked in the mix - young love, happiness, emotion, betrayal, hurt, and devastation to name but a few.

We both took the thought process out of the 'norm' and the Infinity symbol came into play. In order to express the story line a bit more I wanted a knife or a pair of scissors to symbolize the betrayal close friends, and Vanessa came up with this as a first pass:

OK - not great but conceptually it was in the right direction. I wanted to get my developing vision across to Vanessa to make sure we were 'together' on this so I took a trip to the nearest shopping mall and invested less that NZ$10 in purchasing props. That night I went home, cut up an old black sports shirt to act as the backdrop, started to arrange the red ribbon on a cardboard box and then stuck a knife through it. To be fair, a lot of years ago I was quite into photography and did a lot of wedding shoots and stuff like that so I had an idea of what I was doing. Using my iPhone 5S (remembering this was only a mock up for Vanessa to work towards) I started to take some picture. I used sheets to defuse the light and direct the shine off the ribbon, had the iPhone set on manual, no flash and spent the next twenty minutes clicking away. What I didn't expect was the effectiveness of the results:

I sent these off to Vanessa to give her the direction and within the space of a few hours this came back:

Now, I love this, absolutely love it - it says all I want it to say about the story inside. With a huge sense of achievement I sent this off to Judi to tie up with the polished script ready for upload. 

Nope - didn't happen, Judi pointed out something that I hadn't thought of - thumbnail! Obviously an e-book is initially viewed in thumbnail and the title kind of disappeared. And to be truthful she wasn't too keen on the pictorial representation either. So I went back to Vanessa, this was the result of that exchange:

I still like it, I like it a lot - but I just don't 'love it'. I'd hoped that maybe this could be the 'thumbnail' but the first option could actually be the cover - Having checked with Judi I now know this is not possible - we're slaves to our digital masters!

I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts on this. As for the cover - the debate continues, I'll update you as soon as the final final version is ready for upload. The reason that there are no links to this book embedded here is that I want people to wait until the polished version is uploaded first.

AJ Wilson.