Commissioning book covers - Fiverr and Damonza

Here's what $5 gets you in the e-book cover design world:

Yeuch! I got this from Fiverr, and this is after three rounds of edits! Fair enough though, now I know what $5 will get me. And it was both useful and fun to practise giving a designer the information about the book. Here's what I gave the Fiverr guy:

I would like a kitten in silhouette, with the moon above. Soft purple twilight color in the background, with  clouds and flowers and grass silhouette at the bottom. The series title at the top is CHILDREN OF THE WILD CATS. The title is Book 1: Kitten Adventure. The author name for the bottom is Lily Pickles.

Onwards and upwards. So after trawling 'best e-book covers' and Pinterest, I decided to ask Damonza to help me out with a cover. It's my birthday treat to myself.

As well as giving them the series blurb and book 1 overview, here's what I asked for:

It's quite a dark children's book, with themes of religion, family betrayal, loss and grief but also the wonder of nature, fierce love and loyalty and survival.
I want it to appeal to children, but also make it clear from the cover that this cat book is not all sweetness and light, and be quite mysterious.
So I'm thinking of a dark background, either nighttime or twilight, perhaps purple. Perhaps a tree with twisting roots on one side of the page. 
Silhouette of a cat running through the night, with the moon overhead.
Or just a huge, beautiful, piercing cat's eye looking at the reader.
As this is the first in the series, it would be great if the cover could be styled so that the subsequent books are easily recognizable as belonging to the series.

I can't wait to see what they come up with!

Publishing my e-book: Week 1

Wow, what a week. I've gone crazy on Amazon, Fiverr and Craigslist, buying a million books and reading a million blog posts and emailing everyone in the whole world asking for advice. My PayPal account has taken a bashing.

I downloaded InDesign and signed up to Lynda.com to try and teach myself how to lay out my books professionally. I got one hour in to the lessons and realized it wasn't realistic.... hurrah for outsourcing! So as my birthday is coming up, I decided to treat myself to get formatting done by an expert, as well as of course a designer for the front cover. I know my limitations.

It's been over a year since I read my book, so I spent some time today copyediting, and THANK THE LORD that I did. As this is all being done on a shoestring budget, I have to decide where to spend my limited dollars, and editing is where I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut corners and do it DIY style.

I spent hours today fiddling with my chapters, trying to figure out the best way to split it. It's long for a children's book at 48,000 words, and I decided in the end to cut it up into a nice, classic trilogy. It was difficult deciding where to cut each book off, and the final book is much longer than the rest. I think the best strategy will be to also give people the option to buy the whole book as well, so that's four separate ebooks in total, all requiring formatting, front covers and separate Amazon pages.

It's going to be a lot of work... but it's fun!