So we are still on track for a fall release of Juárez Dance and things are picking up. Editing will be completed soon, so the text part of the equation will be seen to, and now I’m putting my head together with JT Lindroos in order to come up with a snazzy cover design.

If you haven’t seen a lot of Lindroos’ work, you can check out his Pinterest page and get an eyeful. I think he does terrific work and I’m absolutely certain he will make Juárez Dance look very, very good.

One thing I have to decide is whether to just do an ebook cover or to ask Lindroos to design a wraparound cover that can be used for a print edition. I’ll be honest and say that I’ve kind of soured on the physical book option, largely because formatting it will be a real pain, but also because the process of getting a book through something like CreateSpace is considerably more challenging than simply making a book available via Amazon’s Kindle.

What I think I may do is go ahead and ask for the wraparound cover as a fallback in case I decide later on to expand into print. That will leave the print option on the table — better not to burn any bridges — and also keep me from having to go back to Lindroos later on to have more work done well after the fact. I just have to make sure he gives me an image formatted for ebook use and one for print use, as I don’t trust myself to crop a larger picture properly. I have software for that sort of thing, but I am decidedly an amateur in that area.

The big question right now, however, is simply what will go on the cover. Lindroos asked me for a simple synopsis of the book so he could get a handle on its subject matter and style and then he requested any specifics I’d like to see incorporated.

I honestly don’t have a lot of ideas about what should go in, but I do have some thoughts on what should stay out. For those who remember the first edition of The Dead Women of Juárez, you may recall that Serpent’s Tail went for a Day of the Dead theme and that’s also the case with Tequila Sunset. For Juárez Dance I want to get away from that and try to evoke a different side of Mexico. The Día de los Muertos is popular in Mexico, but it is very much a common man’s event. Juárez Dance focuses its attention on the wealthy sector of Ciudad Juárez, where such things don’t see a lot of play. Rich people don’t have time for costumes and candles and candy. They have their fortunes to spend and luxuries to enjoy. Consequently I want to try and capture the moneyed aspect of Mexico while still touching on the book’s noirish elements. I explained to Lindroos that Juárez Dance‘s theme is essentially that rich people are not like us, especially when they scheme, and trying to enter their world is a dangerous thing indeed.

Finally I wanted to avoid a generic “man with a gun” image on the cover, as I don’t want to give people the impression that Juárez Dance is action-packed, because it’s not. The proceedings do get violent and even downright gory, but the bulk of the goings-on are psychological in nature. You can look to my previously (or about to be) published work to get a sense of what I’m talking about. I don’t really do action-adventure.

And now it’s in Lindroos’ hands. He said that a project can take as little as two hours or as much as two months, depending on the complexity of the design, and this also makes an impact on price. So far we haven’t discussed money in detail, but that will probably come once we have a better idea of what the work will involve. Rest assured that I will relay all the developments as they happen so that you can have a fuller understanding of what all of this costs, should you decide to go the same route.