A Tower of Mortars and Other Ananse Stories has a new cover and, if I do say so myself, it looks amazing—on the ebook and …drumroll please…, the paperback.

Finally, the paperbacks are coming!

In fact, all the other story collections will be getting new covers and paperback editions too. And yes, there is a story for why and how this happened.:-)

I got the paperback proof of A Tower of Mortars and Other Ananse Stories, months ago. After a bit of tweaking, I was happy with the interior design, but the cover was just…meh. All my efforts at improving the looks did not work.

Regardless of the saying that one should not judge a book by it’s cover, we do in fact, judge books by their covers.

Clearly, I needed help to improve the cover situation. I reached out to a friend who was a graphics designer. She was too busy, but she recommended her apprentice, Celi, for the job. I loved Celi’s work. Check out the results for yourself:

The new ebook cover of Today's Water and Other Ananse Stories features a squatting boy chatting with a spider under a coconut tree.
The old and new covers side by side.
Before and after covers for the paperback version of Today's Water and Other Ananse Stories.

— A ranty aside coming up:
The first paperback proof was printed by Createspace. Amazon recently shut down Createspace and introduced a new printing service, KDP Print. The second proof is from KDP Print, which puts a gray bar across the top of print proofs. The point of a proof is to confirm that everything looks as it should, inside and out. That gray bar just gets in the way when evaluating the cover. Grrr.
— Rant over.

So there you have it. Let me know what you think. I would love to hear from you. The new ebook cover is getting updated slowly across all the digital bookstores. I will update Today’s Water book page as soon as I’m certain the bookstore updates are complete.

In the meantime, we are finishing up a number of small updates to both the cover and the interior of the paperbook version. I can’t wait for all the books collections to get their new covers and paperback versions.

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