I decided to rebrand The Pruxnae Series ahead of the release of Sweet Surrender, the second novel in the main story line, either later this year or in early 2024.

The rebrand entails everything from revisiting the blurbs to deciding what to do with the audiobooks to possibly re-editing the prequel novella, Thief of Hearts. This is an ongoing process and I don't expect it to be completed until at least Sweet Surrender's publication.

Part of the rebrand includes something most people don't give much thought to: each book's cover.

The first novel, The Choosing, and Thief of Hearts both started life with homemade covers.

Yup, I made those myself, and to be honest, they did pretty well.

Of course, that was back in 2015, which was still a bit like the Wild West of indie publishing. I knew the books would need better covers, so as soon as I could, I contracted with a professional designer, Sylvia Frost, who created these lovelies.

I was four books into the series (well, two novels and two novellas) and had started fiddling with the fifth book when I hit a wall and started the slow slide into burnout.

It wasn't until years later (literally years) when I reversed that slide and realized that I'd taken a few wrong turns with The Pruxnae Series.

Late last year, I started correcting the series' path using the main non-Romance storyline (the Sweepers' increased activity) as a guide.

For starters, I pulled Alien Mine and A Warrior's Touch, originally Books 3 and 4, out of the main series and grouped into their own, The Pruxnae: Earthside. Creating a separate but related series allows me to focus on the Sweepers storyline, which is one of the things that drew readers to The Choosing in the first place. It also required renumbering the series, which I hope didn't cause too much confusion.

I won't go into the rest of what I'm doing because that's tangential to the primary topic of this post, which is covers. Suffice it to say that part of my rebranding involved market research, which brought home the fact that the covers are out of date.

So I contacted another cover designer, Open World Cover Designs, and we started the process of rebranding the three stories in the main series ahead of the release of Sweet Surrender (now Book 2 in the main series).

This was not an easy process. Cover design requires multiple steps and a LOT of collaboration between the author and the designer. Sometimes, communication is, well, not that great. The first cover sent back to me didn't even remotely hit the mark. Fortunately, the designer is super easy to work with; after a few back and forths, the problem turned out to be a simple miscommunication of my expectations.

Totally my bad.

So we started again, went back and forth a few more times, and eventually landed on this for the first two covers:

Which I totally love! These are such beautiful covers. They completely capture the tone of the stories and also conform to current genre cover tropes. The "man chest" cover has not decreased in popularity among SciFi Romance readers, and I'm not sure it ever will.

I'll reveal Sweet Surrender's new look closer to publication time.

Now, I'm off to write.