Book covers. Beeeeyooootiful book covers for Vampire State of Mind. And a cheese hat. And a cactus, only it was a Yucca really, and I'm not seventy three.

Oh, the pain, the agony!  Yes, it's decision time again, and you know how having to decide things makes my brain go all 'clicky clicky whirrr', don't you?   And there's always a smell of hot cheese, for some reason I can't define, although it could be my Gruyere hat melting under the strain of thought.  For, lovely people, once more my publishers Choc Lit and I are trying to decide on the perfect cover for the new book, Vampire State of Mind.

Hush, hush, and get back in your seats, for this cover won't be revealed unto you for a bit longer.  For one thing we have to sponge my dribble off and get the teethmarks out, and for another, we haven't quite decided on one yet.  There's so many beautiful things to choose from when you write about vampires... well, there's teeth, for a start, and blood and gorgeous men, and mysterious, dark nights and... yes, all right, we could use an image of Johnny Depp's dentist at midnight, but that's not quite what we're going for here.  Although (she said, tantalisingly) it could be...  See what I did there, I'm trying to whet your appetites!  Subtle, yes?  No, no, you at the back, I'm not trying to wet your appetite, I couldn't do that from all the way over here, not even after those special exercises you recommended, I'm whetting it.  With a H.

 I know, I know, but I reckon a cover like this would just fly, don't you?  I mean, no vampires but... come on...

So, anyway.  I'm looking at lots of lovely potential covers, which all have my name on (no, you never get over the thrill of seeing your own name in print, unless it's the crime pages of the local paper who always spell it wrong anyway and it was a filthy lie about that thing in the Garden Centre; it was a Yucca not a cactus because I don't even think you can do that with a cactus and besides they got my age wrong too).

 Cactus asked for nine further counts to be taken into consideration....

And, oh, the agonies of decision!  And the smell of cheese... So many things to take into consideration; marketability, reader-expectations, font, image, monkeys...

There aren't any monkeys in the book, it's just that I tend to take them into consideration in whatever I do.  Otherwise you're just asking to have pooh thrown at you, aren't you?  Although I make no judgements here about how you spend your spare time, during the book-marketing process pooh-flinging is an unnecessary impediment to the real matter in hand, which is getting a really stonking cover onto the book.  And, since Choc Lit have provided me with a choice of stonk, it's time to go and crank up the hat...