The Bomber Jacket from First Page to Finally, Published!
Cover Reveal and Becoming a Marketer
It was August 19, 2023, and I had a signed book contract for The Bomber Jacket in hand. In a year, on August 20, 2024,the published version would be available for sale.
It felt more than surreal. It had been almost twenty years since I started writing my World War II historical novel. How I wished my friend Dani had been there to celebrate my book contract. I resolved to do my very best to make this book a success in her honor.
Little did I know how much work that resolution would entail.
Though I’d been writing fiction for decades, had been to lots of writing conferences, and read tons of books about getting your novel published, I had only a vague idea of what happens between signing the contract and your first book signing event.
My publisher, Wild Ink Publishers, is a small, independent company. What that meant is they’d be bringing my book to market a lot faster than many of the “big five” New York publishers would, especially for an unknown first-time novelist. When you work with a small publisher, you get to know the owners and staff on a personal basis. You are not just one of hundreds of authors they deal with.
However, because they are not one of the “big five,” their budget for marketing is limited. They’re not going to be sending you on a multi-city book tour, place advertisements in glossy magazines, or get you on a late-night talk show. They will do a spectacular job of doing all the intense work it takes to get the book published, which means story and line editing, proofreading, providing galley proofs, designing a cover, obtaining the ISBN number, finding ARC (advanced reader copy) readers, working with the printer and distributor, and touting your book all over social media.
But you, the writer, are going to be the boots on the ground when it comes to promoting and selling your book.
I basked in my own personal glory for a couple months, then decided I needed to get serious. While I waited for the Cover Reveal, the first big event in the lead-up to launch, I began to work with my website designer, Tamara Behun of Areca Marketing, to consider what I wanted in an author’s website. First, we brainstormed ideas for the website name, and she researched what was available. I considered ones with my name alone: kathleenking.com or kathleenmarieking.com and others which connected me to being a novelist: kkingauthor.com, authorkking.com, kkingwriter.com, writerkking.com, kkingbooks.com and kkingadventures.com.
In the end I chose kmkingauthor.com because I would be writing under the name K.M. King.
Next, Tamara had me research websites of my favorite writers to determine which features and visual aspects I liked and wanted in my own website. After looking at dozens of them, I narrowed them down to New York Times bestselling authors Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Berg. Tyler is the author of more than twenty books and won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons and was shortlisted for The Brooker Prize for A Spool of Blue Thread. Berg has written more than thirty books. Her novels Durable Goods and Joy School were named American Library Association best book of the year and Talk Before Sleep was an Oprah Book Club selection. I liked their websites because they felt welcoming and approachable, focused on their current book right away, had a simple structure, and were visually engaging.
Tamara and I determined to start small and gradually add more features. We agreed to a landing page featuring The Bomber Jacket, a bio page, a coming soon page introducing Jenna’s Journey, my young adult series, and a contacts page where people could leave comments or sign up for a mailing list.
I was contemplating writing a blog about my love of Kdrama or one about how The Bomber Jacket came to be, so we’d need a page for one or both of them. In the end, we decided to host my Kdrama blog, Kdramaforlife.com on its own URL, and include The Story of a Book: The Bomber Jacket from First Page to Finally, Published! on the contents line of my website as Bomber Jacket Backstory.
All of this took months, as I needed to write lots of content and Tamara needed to come up with a design, color scheme, and layout that suited me. I finally launched my website on May 6, 2024. It captured everything I had in mind as a lovely, inviting, engaging website. Tamara did a fabulous job.
In the middle of this process, in January 2024, Abigail Wild send me a text indicating she would be starting on my cover design very soon. Before Abby ventured into the publishing business, she spent years as a graphic designer. She personally crafts the cover of each book that her company publishes. The text said, “I wanted to touch base with you about your vision for your cover for The Bomber Jacket. I’m just looking for your aesthetic vision for the book and what is pleasing to your eye. Some find it helpful to pull three covers from the Amazon best seller list in their genre. This would not be for me to copy, rather just to find the feel you are shooting for. Others like to build a Pinterest board of images that resonate with the book. I just need a visual on what you would make your heart sing.”
I did as directed and sent her some images, but none of them quite captured my vision of this book. The main visual, in my mind, was the bomber jacket itself. But how to feature that on a cover? Well, Abby knew how. She offered me three options, but it was the third one that literally had me catching my breath: a close up of a bomber jacket that filled the entire cover, overlaid with the title and my name in bold, white letters.
Wow. I was literally speechless. She nailed it. And that’s the one we revealed to the world on February 5.
But I skipped a major piece of the story which was occurring at the same time, starting in January and running through to July of 2024: the story and line editing, proofreading, review of galley proofs, and the physical print proof. All of that in the next Chapter!
