Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher
Lesson learned yesterday. I was at a young authors conference conducting a few writing workshops with about 20 other writers, illustrators and storytellers. Part of the event included a book fair where students could buy copies of the presenters' books.
I dragged out all three titles, and I expected a lot of the Mystery of the Mad Science Teacher to sell because it's the brand new book. However, I was still stunned at how few copies of The Mystery of the Frozen Brains sold. The Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul outsold the book by nearly 3 times, even though most students have bought the book (I should know... I personally sold those books at a lot of the schools). The first title has the weakest cover and I believe that first impression means everything. I can't wait until I get the new cover of the first book. Then I'll see how well the book sells. I hope I'm right about this, because my publisher sunk extra dollars to commission an illustrator to redo the cover. Plus, they had to fork over the money to redo the graphic design.
Anyway, all this blog is about is to remind myself that if I'm going to self-publish the picture book, I'd better test drive the cover with students and make sure that it grabs people's attention.