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Elizabeth Bell, Author

Undeniable Love. Unflinching History. Unforgettable Fiction.

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    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 1: Necessary Sins
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 2: Lost Saints
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 3: Native Stranger
    • Lazare Family Saga, Book 4: Sweet Medicine
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Sale

Read or Listen for Free This Month!

October 3, 2022 by Elizabeth Bell

Are you new to my historical fiction quartet, The Lazare Family Saga? Perhaps you’d like to revisit where it all began, now that I’ve made a few changes. I’ve got great news:

If you’re a U.S. member of Amazon Prime, the Kindle edition of Necessary Sins, Book One of The Lazare Family Saga, is free to read now through November 30th!

Prefer the audiobook? I’ve also made the Necessary Sins audiobook free for the month of October! That’s how much I love my narrator’s performance: I want as many people as possible to hear it. Here’s how to claim the Necessary Sins audiobook: Sign up for a free NetGalley account and download the free NetGalley Shelf app. 

Necessary Sins is set to Listen Now, which means you don’t have to wait for approval from the publisher (my NetGalley co-op, BooksGoSocial)—you can start listening instantly. If you download Necessary Sins to your NetGalley Shelf app, you can listen for up to a year.

Click on the image above to go to the NetGalley listing!

If your library has Overdrive/Libby, you can also ask them to purchase my audiobooks. Here’s a help article, and here’s how I did it through my public library. Follow the gold stars in the images below!

1. Search for my audiobooks in your library’s Overdrive collection. I recommend searching by Lazare Family Saga or the book title rather than by Elizabeth Bell, which will give you lots of irrelevant results. You may need to broaden your search to “add titles the library doesn’t own.”

2. When you find Necessary Sins, click on the “RECOMMEND” option under the cover.

3. Fill in your email and hit the RECOMMEND button. If your library purchases my audiobook, you’ll have the first chance to borrow it!

My library allows each patron to recommend only one book every 30 days, so you may need to wait before you can recommend the rest of The Lazare Family Saga: Lost Saints, Native Stranger, and Sweet Medicine. 😉

Happy listening!

Filed Under: Audiobooks, Marketing, Sale Tagged With: audiobooks, library

Necessary Sins Has a New Cover!

December 2, 2021 by Elizabeth Bell

Being an independent author means a constant, steep learning curve. Most recently, what’s literally kept me up at night is the realization that my beautiful book covers are nevertheless preventing The Lazare Family Saga from reaching readers. In the 21st century, books—especially indie books like mine—are competing in a crowded digital marketplace. A book brand-new to a reader browsing Amazon or Facebook has literally two seconds to communicate “You would like me!” before that reader scrolls past, never to think of it again. Book covers communicate “You would like me” by reminding readers of the books they love and by communicating genre. Beautiful as they may be, my current covers aren’t doing either of those essentials well.

I thought I understood good cover design. I planned my covers for years as I was writing. I even based my cover concept on other historical novels I’d seen. But those covers came from traditional publishers with marketing budgets and/or authors who were already established. I’m trying to reach people who’ve never heard of me, so my covers have to work harder.

I didn’t fully appreciate The Two-Second Rule or the importance of a cover looking good at thumbnail size. In a digital environment, a book isn’t a physical object to be leisurely admired but a tiny postage stamp that needs to work at a glance. My current covers from Bookfly Design are beautiful and they illustrate my books well. Between picture research and fine-tuning, these covers represent years of painstaking labor by both my designer and myself. I love them, they’re works of art, and I’ve got them hanging on my wall.

The four original covers of The Lazare Family Saga

Alas, I’ve learned the hard way that a beautiful work of art does not necessarily make a good book cover. At thumbnail size, these covers aren’t doing their jobs of attracting new readers. There are too many focal points: top image, decorative title plate, and bottom image. People don’t know where to look, so they look away. To quote a marketing adage: “The confused mind says ‘No.'” The first cover, the most important one, is also communicating the wrong things. It’s not saying “antebellum American South” or even “historical fiction” clearly, and many people are mistaking it for genres it’s not.

If you’ve read Necessary Sins, you know why I suggested to my designer that we feature the hands of my priest protagonist, Joseph Lazare. When he’s ordained, his hands are anointed; and when Joseph and his soulmate Tessa touch hands in the book, the moments are erotically charged. But that eroticism is apparent in the cover only if you’ve already read Necessary Sins. To people brand-new to my work, those tender joined hands apparently indicate “This is sweet and clean Christian fiction”—in other words: “There is no on-the-page sex and this book will confirm your faith.” Which is not at all what Necessary Sins is about!

Therefore, in the short term, I worked with my current designer to revise the cover of Necessary Sins so that it more clearly communicates “forbidden love in the antebellum American South involving a Catholic priest.” I was happy to find stock images we could use for both Joseph and Tessa. These images were just uploaded to stock sites in 2020, so they weren’t available when we were designing the first Necessary Sins cover back in 2019.

The new Necessary Sins cover

Can you make out the Spanish moss and the parterre garden behind the woman, typical of my Charleston, SC setting? They aren’t as clear as I’d like, but that’s a saga in and of itself. The woman’s barely-visible attire might also be mistaken for a nightgown. In the original image, she’s fully dressed.

As you may know, chopping off people’s heads is standard practice in historical fiction covers, and it certainly has its advantages. I love the dramatic lighting in the image of this priest in a confessional, but the top half of the model’s head is all wrong for Joseph. The model is a White man with brown hair in a 21st-century style; but if we crop him correctly, he’s more racially ambiguous and can “pass” for Joseph, my black-haired priest who has French and African ancestry and passes as White.

The right mood for Joseph, but the wrong looks (from Depositphotos)

As of this writing, the new cover is live only for the ebook of Necessary Sins. My designer is currently at work on the paperback and hardcover versions. The “hands cover” has become a limited first edition—so if you love it like I do, now would be the time to buy it. 😉

Prefer the ebook? You’re in luck: my shiny new cover and all its contents are on sale for just 99 cents/pence through December 8, 2021. I do like how the man and woman are separated on the new Book One of the series and united on Book Four. It’s great symbolism.

The Lazare Family Saga with the new Necessary Sins cover

However, this new version of Necessary Sins doesn’t solve the thumbnail problem or pass the Two-Second Test. In order to fix those, after much figurative hair-pulling and literal gnashing of teeth (damn TMD), I have decided to hire a new cover designer to completely redo the whole Lazare Family Saga series. I hope we’ll end up with people on all the covers, and that we’ll be able to include their full faces. After weeks of searching, I’ve found some promising new stock images.

We can’t use the shot of the priest in the confessional with the dramatic lighting, because I’m determined that Joseph will finally have the right skin tone on my upcoming covers. This is impossible with an unedited stock image, because light-skinned Black men in cassocks simply don’t exist on stock sites. But my new designer should be able to do a “head swap” and dress a light-skinned Black model in a cassock, given the right images. Have I found them? Will my designer find them? Will we go in a totally different direction with the new covers?

Only 2022 knows.

Your turn! What do you think of the new Necessary Sins cover? What would you like to see on my redesigned Lazare Family Saga covers? What are some of your favorite historical fiction or family saga covers? Are you an author with a cover revision saga of your own? I’d love to hear from you!

Filed Under: Going Indie, Historical Fiction, Publishing, Sale, Writer's Life Tagged With: covers, genre, marketing

Do I Get An A+?

September 8, 2021 by Elizabeth Bell

Firstly, I am thrilled to share that Amazon.com selected Necessary Sins, the first book in my Lazare Family Saga, as one of their Prime Reads for the months of September, October, and November 2021. If you’re a U.S. member of Amazon Prime, that means you can read the Kindle edition of Necessary Sins for free now through November 30, 2021. Alas, this offer is available only to U.S. Prime members. Amazon makes the rules, not I!

Please help me spread the word to other U.S. Prime members who enjoy historical fiction, family sagas, stories of forbidden love, or stories set in Charleston! Click on the image below or here’s the link to Necessary Sins on Amazon.com.

Secondly, I’m glad I was able to get together my A+ Content before my Prime Read months—but now there are considerably more eyes on my book pages, and I’m second-guessing my choices!

What is A+ Content, you ask? It’s an area on each Amazon book page where the publisher can add more information and/or pretty images. This area used to be available only to big names, but now Amazon is allowing all publishers to use it—including indie publishers like yours truly.

We have to follow certain parameters, and we get five spots per item to fill with A+ content, which must be approved by Amazon folks. I had to decide what aspects of my fiction to feature and then hunt down images. I wanted a common theme across all four of my books. I decided to focus on my settings and have my captions be a narrative—but I had to avoid spoilers.

Below, I’ve shared all of my A+ content. The titles are links to how the images actually appear on Amazon, under the “From the Publisher” section on each book page. Each novel has four unique images followed by a series image that I used for all the books.

Any text in the A+ images has to be legible on both desktop computers and mobile devices. Therein lies the rub. In making the text large enough for mobile devices, I may have made it too large to look good on desktops. What do you think? Is my A+ text too shouty and overwhelming? Should I dial it back a little?

Book One of the Lazare Family Saga: Necessary Sins

Book Two of the Lazare Family Saga: Lost Saints

Book Three of the Lazare Family Saga: Native Stranger

Book Four of the Lazare Family Saga: Sweet Medicine

What did you think? I agonized over every detail, from images to colors to fonts, and I want to make sure my A+ content is fabulous before I expand it to the UK, Canadian, and Australian Amazon sites.

In this post, at least one image for each book is clickable and will take you to a secret page of behind-the-scenes info. I purchased most of the images from a stock site called DepositPhotos, and I added text using Canva.

Finally, on the Amazon pages for Necessary Sins and Lost Saints, you may have noticed that these first two books in The Lazare Family Saga are now available in hardcover! Native Stranger and Sweet Medicine will be in hardcover soon. The conversion process is lengthy and complicated, but the end product is both beautiful and durable. I can hardly wait till the set is complete!

Filed Under: Going Indie, Publishing, Sale

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Recent Posts

  • My Debt to Colonial Williamsburg
  • Character Art!
  • Now in Audio: The Complete Lazare Family Saga!
  • Read or Listen for Free This Month!
  • Necessary Sins Is An Audiobook!
  • How I Found My Audiobook Narrator
  • Anatomy of a Book Cover, Part 2
  • Anatomy of a Book Cover, Part 1
  • On Second Thought…
  • Necessary Sins Has a New Cover!
  • Do I Get An A+?
  • What I’m Working On Now
  • A Lazare Family Tree
  • The Sweetest Medicine
  • What’s in a (Character) Name?

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