Love New Zealand series gets a makeover!

A couple of months ago, I decided to create hardcover editions for my Love New Zealand series. I love how the hardcover of My Lucky Star (my latest release) turned out, and wanted to explore a new design direction – especially as Love New Zealand series has a bit of women’s fiction thrown in with the romance. So, inspired by Emily Henry’s UK covers, I did brand-new designs. Here’s how they turned out…

As I was designing the covers, one thing led to another, and I ended up fully rewriting the first book. Not because I thought It was bad, but it read a bit like a thriller, and wasn’t in line with the latest books I’d written. I wanted to bring in more romance, and ended up adding some spice, too. It’ll never be perfect, and I’m not after perfection at all. AI can do that. I’ll do the human thing, and this book is now what I want it to be. Perfectly flawed, funny, emotional and spicy.

After that, I ended up re-editing Hidden Gem, which didn’t need that much work. But after writing more books, I’ve learned more about optimising the flow. Nothing in the language should give you pause, not even a beautiful sentence or an interesting word choice. Or, the far more likely, needlessly convoluted sentence. So, I improved what I could.

Once all the books were ready for republishing, I decided to update the ebook and paperback covers as well, keeping the look a bit closer to the original (so the genre is evident) but redrawing all characters, since my illustration style has also evolved over the last couple of years. We spent the last year on the road and after launching the 3rd book, I failed to market this series the way it deserved to be marketed. So, drawing the characters felt like the least I could do for these beautiful, complex characters I’d grown to love.

I can’t say I really thought this through. Updating three books in ebook, paperback and hardcover formats across all the platforms, has been a massive amount of work, which will likely never pay off in terms of sales. But I’m happier with my own books and, now that it’s all done, that has to count for something.