Sorry for the silence lately, there’s been a lot going on!

Firstly, the server that the blog is hosted on was hit by a DDoS attack, which meant it was down for about 48 hours. That meant that at the time when I’d usually be scheduling in blog posts, the site was down. This put me massively behind schedule. I ended up falling behind on blogs, and decided I’d rather focus on finishing What Happens in New York, then return to the blog when it’s all over.

And finally, finally, it is.

About five minutes ago, I submitted the print version of What Happens in New York to CreateSpace. The final Kindle version went up on Kindle last night, and iBooks is in progress (once I figure out the whole pen name thing on there — if you have any details I’d love to hear them).

CreateSpace was a pain because it seems to add in a couple of extra pages compared to the PDF Scrivener generates. I’ve not quite worked out where these pages come from yet. If/when I do, I’ll let you know.

I’ve had the print cover on the back burner for a while, but until I knew the final page count I couldn’t finalise the design. There’s some crazy maths involved in working out the spine size, but thankfully CreateSpace automatically generates a template for you based on the type of paper and number of pages.

All books have the publisher’s mark on the spine, and since I don’t have a publisher’s mark, I decided to make one of my own. The image is another stock photo, this time from Adobe Stock (the cover image is from iStock). It’s a vector of a bottle of nail varnish with a round-cornered square border. I have quite the nail varnish collection (100+), so it’s the perfect logo for me! I almost went with a stiletto, but as the book covers also have them on, I felt it might be overkill. I’m not sure they’d really work on the non-fiction stuff, either.

One of the earlier versions used the same font for the blurb text as is used in ‘New York’ (Playfair Display). This was quite difficult to read though, since it’s a serif font. It took me a while to realise that the serif font was the problem, but as soon as I switched to something else (I can’t remember what I chose, I think it’s Helvetica), it instantly became easier to read.

So, without further ado, presenting the print cover for What Happens in New York!

Fame. Fashion. Friendship. Two friends. One life-changing vacation.

Let me know what you think below! I’d love to hear your thoughts 🙂

More details about the print version of What Happens in New York will be coming soon, so keep your eye on this blog, my Facebook page, and my Twitter feed!

And don’t forget, the launch event is on 26 May at Nottingham Writers’ Studio!