Titles and covers again

I have my new cover to match the new title on my upcoming release. For better or worse, this is it!

The worst of the double edit is behind me now. There are about six chapters printed out and waiting my attention. I've edited them on screen, but tomorrow I shall edit the print-out and make necessary adjustments. (There always are!) I think by tomorrow night I shall be finished. What a relief!

One thing I've discovered with covers is to get the size right for Amazon Kindle first of all. They recommend 1563x2071, and getting that right after you've worked on illustration can be soul destroying. To get the right size you sometimes need to be able to free up proportion constraints and that, as you can imagine, sends your illustration through the wringer. Dragons come out looking like swans and vice versa.

Colours are important. I want the cover to stand out among all the others, and somehow Black and Red just didn't do it for me this time. It looks fine close up, but viewed among many others, it just faded away, whereas the orange cover still drew the eye.
Well, OK, it drew my eye. 

I hope the dragon head says Viking to everyone who looks at it. The story is a romance, but I didn't want to put a bare-chested man in a fur tunic on the cover. Tell me I'm wrong or old-fashioned if you must, but that sort of cover says to me that there is only romance in the story. My stories have romance, sure, but they also have adventure, death and disaster. The villain certainly gets what he deserves in this one! The hero is Oli, a sixteen-year-old who falls head-over-heels in love with a girl who has rather a lot of problems to solve. Oli was nine years old in my book Far After Gold and his life with Flane and Emer has been fairy easy up until this point. If he wants to win the girl,he has to rise to the challenge and Karli Olafsson is no normal Viking.....
Look out for Viking Magic on Amazon Kindle in the next couple of weeks.