After hitting Send, she went on to Stacy’s response on the T-shirt designs. Frankie smiled as she read Stacy’s words. She’d like them all but numbers one, three, four, and five were her favorites. She wanted those four, and only had changes on two of them. The changes were simple fixes. She wanted the colors brighter on number three and on number four, she wanted more blue and green.
Frankie went to work on those immediately and was nearly done with them when her phone rang. “Hello?”
“Ms. Vaughn? This is Allan. Westmore.”
“Nice to talk to you, Allan. Please, call me Frankie. I’m interested in hearing more about these covers you’re after.”
He talked at length for several minutes about the story and the characters, giving her a lot more detail than she needed but she loved his enthusiasm. While he spoke, she did a quick search for him on Amazon.
He had two book series out already. They had a lot of good reviews. Her work would be seen by a lot of people if this happened. She wanted this job. When he took a breath, she interjected, “You seem to be a pretty popular author.”
He hemmed and hawed a little. “I do all right. I’m lucky that my fan base is loyal, but I’d like to expand it. Sci-fi is a popular genre, but it can be hard to stand out. That’s why I’m trying to go a different route with my covers.”
She looked at his existing covers. They were pretty typical. Lots of dark space scattered with stars, a spaceship front and center, maybe a planet in the background. In several there was a fleet of small spacecraft in the distance. “Can you send me the titles and blurbs for this new series? Or at least for the first book?”
“Sure. Do you have some ideas?”
“I do but I need to ask a few questions. How much do you want to stand out?”
“Well…the books need to be recognizable as sci-fi, but they need to pop, too. I want them to be eye-catching. To possibly appeal to someone who wouldn’t necessarily read sci-fi. I guess that doesn’t really help.”
“No, it does. How do you feel about color?”
“I like it, I guess.”
“Right now, your covers don’t have a lot of color. They’re kind of dark, actually. That seems fairly standard, but I believe it’spossible to do sci-fi with color. Maybe once you send the title and blurb, I could mock something up, see what you think of it?”
“Okay, yeah, that would be good.”
“I have a small window of availability at the moment. I’ve just started a new portrait, and it’s going to take quite a bit of time, but in between some of the prep, I can probably get you a sample of what I mean.”
“Is the portrait of Stacy’s cats?”
Frankie chuckled. “No, it’s actually a portrait of Arlington Marsh. Do you know who that is?”
“Heck, yes. He was the Doomsday Oracle in theBlackstone Detective Agencyseries. He was a total boss on that show. Did someone commission you to do that or are you doing it for fun?”
Frankie rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. Like she had time to do portraits in oil for fun. “His son commissioned it, actually.” Okay, so she was sort of name-dropping, but she had a feeling that Allan needed a little impressing.
“For real?”
“For real.”
“Wow. Okay, listen, I would love to see what you come up with. You sound busy, though. What’s your schedule like for getting these done?”
“When do you need these covers?”
“You know how it is. The sooner I can get them up for preorder, the more sales I can gather. Could you have the first one for me in a month?”
Frankie smiled. “If you like my idea, that shouldn’t be a problem. Do you want typography, too?”
“You mean the title and author name?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I want a complete cover.”
“Okay. Still very doable. In addition to the title and blurb, I’d like you to send me two existing covers you like, and two youdon’t.” Giving him a little homework would give him some skin in the game. Make him feel like a bigger part of the process. It was a technique she’d used with her students.
