New cover for Golden City!

Sharon Manssen

It took a while, but in December 2023 I finally got all my covers updated to the same style and all four books are actually the same size now!

I used 100 Covers and would highly recommend them. Unlike some other designers, they will keep on tweaking the cover until you’re completely satisfied. You can order a cover for just an e-book, or full wrappers for paperback or hardcover books. This one took a couple of months from start to finish, but I think the longest was 3 months.

Here’s what the process goes like:

  • You complete the online form & select the package you want (e-book only through to full suite of merchandise)
  • This includes providing links to covers of 3 books that reflect the style you want (it pays to check out the top 10 covers of books that you want to compete with so you can see what’s popular)
  • You describe things that are important to your book cover – the setting, a description of your character, is it magical etc
  • You can provide extra images of example of things that you think evoke the look & feel of your cover.

Here’s an example some images I sent through for The Tablet.

The other thing that you may not be aware of is that different platforms that print-on-demand (POD) have different requirements: crop lines or bleed widths or the barcode being embedded or not, etc. So 100 Covers provided me with 3 slightly different POD covers for Amazon, Draft2Digital and IngramSpark. And they’d keep tweaking it until it worked.

Here’s three different POD covers for Golden City:

Click here to purchase Medar – Realmshift Trilogy Book 1

Click here to purchase Tyrelia – Realmshift Trilogy Book 2

Click here to purchase Golden City – Realmshift Trilogy Book 3

Click here to purchase The Tablet – a Realmshift Trilogy prequel

Published by Sharon Manssen

A fantasy fan since being read 'The Hobbit' by her father at the fireside at the age of six, S R Manssen has been an avid bookworm her entire life. She is the multi-award nominated author of The Realmshift Trilogy – a YA fantasy fiction trilogy comprising four books (I know!). Sharon had a multi-cultural upbringing, attending high school in Belgium (in Flemish) and working 9 years in Bangkok, Thailand. It was there she realised she had a story inside her which she then proceeded to write over the next ten years, squeezing writing in between raising a family and working full time as a professional engineer. Her books have variously been finalists in the Tom Fitzgibbon Award, the SJV Awards and the Caleb Awards. She served as the President of Tauranga Writers for nearly 5 years and has been the President of SpecFicNZ since 2022. She is a StartWrite Manuscript assessor and Youth Mentor with NZSA.

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