I’ve had a really great few weeks, on both my upcoming novel and my current work in progress, so I thought I’d do a quick update here.
Publicity has ramped up on The Love I Could Have Had (coming July 11, pre-orders for e-books here) and this past week, we revealed the cover. I love it so much! Graphically, it’s themed very much the same as my first novel, The Love of My Other Life, with a split cover to represent the parallel realities my protagonist is faced with, but with different colours and illustrations.
Check the cover out! Isn’t she so pretty? What a great job by Lisa Brewster, cover designer at The Brewster Project, with excellent guidance from the Joffe Books team, of course. There was a bit of initial back and forth, with me being fussy about the quality of the orange and turquoise colours (the original orange had more brown and less coral than we ended up with, and the turquoise wasn’t quite as vibrant as it is now) so I’m glad I pushed for the beachier, brighter, more summery colours because I now think it’s just perfect.
So now we have this cover visual, we’ve been promoting the living heck out of it. I have to confess that I am a full card-carrying addict of the Canva design app, and I’m creating all these fun Instagram and Facebook graphics and videos, which I’m rolling out over the next six weeks until launch day on July 11th. (Eeeeek!)
Here is a sneak peek at one example – isn’t it fun? I’ve worked on graphics in both Canva and Photoshop, as some of the effects are a bit fiddly, given that the book isn’t real (yet!)
We also had some great news from the specialist agent that my publisher uses to sell on foreign rights – an offer for a two-book deal for both my debut and this year’s book to be translated into and published in Serbian, by Serbian publisher Laguna! Which I of course gratefully accepted. That’ll be the sixth foreign-language deal for The Love of My Other Life, and the first for The Love I Could Have Had. Very exciting! And, of course, it gave me another new thing to announce on social media and create some foreign-flag-based graphics for.
Playing about in Canva for hours on end is certainly a very effective way to procrastinate from what I should be doing, which is working on my new-new book, my current work in progress. This is what I’m very much hoping will be the third of my multiverse romance novels!
Fortunately, I recently went on a weekend writing retreat in the Catskills Mountains in New York State, where I could focus and bash out the rest of my “draft zero” (too rough to even describe as a first draft!). The hilltop place where I stayed with three other women writers – whom I’d made friends with at last year’s Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York – was truly glorious and an extremely inspiring place in which to write. Check it out…
I wrote 15,000 words across the two full writing days of our retreat, which felt incredible. Now I can really get down to improving my initial draft, fleshing out the back story and editing as I go.
But, I mean, come on, I can’t do that today. I have to create a lovely graphic to go with this blog post… then I have to share it all on my social feeds, and craft captions… I guess I’ll just get to my revisions tomorrow!
CJ Connolly 