Third Time’s the Charm?

Yes, I have changed the covers of the four books in The Lazare Family Saga…again. (Please be patient while I update the twenty-odd places where the old covers appear and I have the power to change them, including this website.)

Yet another cover refresh was a decision I made not lightly but with great anguish. Twice before, I’ve been through the cover design process with a designer. I knew it would be time-consuming, expensive, and anxiety-inducing. But an indie author’s book covers are her most powerful marketing tool, and my 2022 covers had accomplished what they could for me.

One of the many troubles with writing fiction that crosses genres is managing reader expectations. You don’t want your covers to signal to the potential reader that they’ll have a certain kind of experience (i.e. a particular genre) if your work doesn’t quite fulfill that experience. When that happens, your readers leave you nasty reviews about it. Your cover will attract the wrong readers—and arguably worse, you’ll turn away other readers who would have enjoyed your work if your cover had signalled that something else waited inside. When you’ve created your own genre, you have to pick what to emphasize and find ways to straddle lines.

Reluctantly, I realized I would need to go back to the digital drawing board (with the help of a professional designer) and arrive at designs that signalled the literary quality of my writing and the depth in my stories while also hinting at the “heat.”

Nearly a year ago, in April 2025, I started researching cover concepts that might work for Take Three with my covers. I also researched cover designers and found one I was excited to work with. She was very highly regarded in indie circles, and she’d even redesigned other series for indie historical novelists. Because she was in such high demand, the waiting list to work with her was long. She couldn’t fit me into her schedule for five months. I sighed and told myself the wait would be worth it. I agonized over her lengthy cover questionnaire, reviewing it over and over again to make sure I was conveying the right information.

Reader, the wait was not worth it. At last, this designer sent me three first drafts of Books One and Two, which she designed together. And I disliked all three of these concepts. The designer had ignored the concept I thought had the most potential (described below). Instead, this designer’s Cover Set #1 looked like “sweet and clean” historical romances with only flowers and scrolly text. The other two covers for Necessary Sins ignored my instruction to represent Joseph on the covers and represented his beloved Tessa instead (who is never a point-of-view character). Cover Set #2 was clearly historical fiction but featured bland sepia-toned pencil drawings. Necessary Sins looked like a Jane Austen novel with a dowdy Regency heroine. Lost Saints had a middle-aged Native American man on the cover. Who was he? Cover Set #3 at least looked like literary fiction and had potential as a concept, but the fellow authors I asked couldn’t even figure out what the design on Necessary Sins was supposed to be. If I squinted, I could see it was the silhouette of a woman in an enormous feathered hat, a fashion demure Tessa would never wear—not to mention its being 60 years past her time. Lost Saints #2 and #3 also sported headbands on the Native men depicted, something out of racist Hollywood Westerns and wholly inappropriate for Cheyenne attire. Those were only the covers’ gravest sins.

How could this be the same designer who’d created powerful digital works of art for fellow indie historical novelists? I tried to gently point out how she’d ignored key elements I’d asked for and run with elements I’d told her to avoid. The designer revealed she was enduring a custody battle and decided she didn’t have time or energy to devote to my redesign. She quit. After five long months of waiting for her, I was back to square one.

In October 2025, I re-hired my second designer, Damonza, and described a concept I thought might work. I wanted my new covers to say “literary historical fiction” or “book club fiction.”

Over six more months, Damonza and I refined this concept into these four designs:

Overall, the reaction to these covers has been enthusiastically positive. People have said “This cover pounded my historical-saga-family-secrets-READ ME-button!” and “I can tell these are high-brow! They look like they belong on the cover of a magazine telling me I should read more important books.”

Alas, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. I’ve had fellow historical novelists tell me to start over because the historical settings aren’t clear. The thing about historical fiction is that it’s a catch-all genre. So many different kinds of stories are set in the past. My work isn’t biographical fiction and doesn’t have the feminist focus most people expect from historical novels published in the 21st century. So I don’t want to signal those things. I want my covers to say “character-driven, hidden depths, secrets” and to suggest that my work has “heat” with its open-door love scenes. Other people have told me that they find the single eye staring at them from the covers “unsettling.” Hopefully, those are not the people who would enjoy The Lazare Family Saga. If you’re not ready to be unsettled, you shouldn’t be reading my work.

What do you think of my new designs? Damonza is currently working on the square audiobook versions, but I’m not 100% certain yet if I’ll have them create paperback versions as well. Do you think we should, or should I stick with these print covers?

In a future post, I’ll take you through the most important details on my 2026 “characters peering” covers. To be continued!