This Old Haunt: New Title, New Cover

This weekend I’m planning to buckle down and make some headway on getting This Old Haunt ready for publication. In the meantime, since TOH was never intended to be more than a working title, and since the cover I created for the Scribd version two years ago doesn’t really accurately reflect the book’s romantic-comedic tone (and was also just bad), I redid them both, which resulted in this:

Some notes:

  • I toyed with a few different titles, including borrowing from myself (and Buffy) and calling it Something Other Than Dead; I also considered just Restless (another Buffy nod) and Restless Souls. But I think Restless Spirits fits the story best, and gives it that slightly playful vibe. I worried over it a little because there are a couple of books with that title already in the Kindle store, but their genres are different enough that I think I’m good.
  • For the longest time I was fixated on having a depiction of Sarah’s red ball on the cover, but that was when I was still telling myself that this was a horror story. When I got over myself and admitted that it’s not really that horrific, and that it is, in fact, a romance novel, I was able to broaden my image search parameters. I’m pretty happy with this picture. The model is close enough to the description of my protag, and she’s slightly ethereal and come-hither without being too on-the-nose ghostly.
  • I think I’ve decided that I’ll be going with Jean Marie Bauhaus for romance and stories that appeal primarily to women, and J. M. Bauhaus for my slightly more masculine works.

Thoughts?