Black is the fashionable color for Kindle ebook covers this season, with a clutch of new ebooks from Amazon Publishing landing in the top 20 all sporting covers in the slimming shade.
Earlier this week, Amazon Publishing’s various imprints had six ebooks in the Kindle top 20 paid best sellers. The AP representatives kicked off with Hidden by Catherine McKenzie from Lake Union in seventh, Thomas & Mercer’s Mickey Outside by David Lender at number 11, legal thriller Death on a High Floor by Charles Rosenberg, again from Thomas & Mercer, in 12th place.
The AP spree continued with Better Off Without Him by Dee Ernst published by Montlake Romance at 14th, The Bird Eater (which features a horribly effective cover) by Ania Ahlborn from 47North in 19th place and The Seventh Child by Erik Valeur from Amazon Crossing at No 20, which is a Scandi-crime import of a Danish best-seller from 2011.
Back in black
Stark black is one of the lesser used colors on book covers, so it’s interesting to see The Bird Eater, Death on a High Floor and The Seventh Child all featuring black backgrounds with simple and clean designs.
Death on a High Floor is a particularly simple design, with red type on a black background (a combination that is often doomed to failure but which succeeds very well here) and a dagger device standing in for the i in High. It tells you all you need to know at a glance, which is the mark of a great ebook cover.
Bird on a wire
The Bird Eater has a shudderingly good cover, from Cyanotype Book Architects. They must have set up and shot the picture for the cover themselves as I can’t imagine a stock agency even having the components necessary. The designers’ website features a selection of their impressive cover work which is well worth looking at. The other two books don’t feature cover design credits, which I always think is a shame.
The Bird Eater is a horror novel by Polish-born author Ania Ahlborn, who now lives in New Mexico. She spent her youth crawling through a hole in fence into a cemetery where she would break up bouquets of silk flowers so everybody would have their fair share. That’s the sort of background you need to be a horror writer.
The grapes of Roth
The top 20 was again dominated by Veronica Roth, who’s outshooting even the incredible selling pace of The Hunger Games. Her books were taking the top three positions, with Divergent top, the Divergent series collection second and Insurgent in third spot, all filling the Random coffers.
Self-published Laurelin Paige broke the Roth hold with a Boxed set of her Fixed trilogy in fourth place, edging out another Roth book, Allegiant, in sixth.
However, a day is a long time in the Kindle top 20 and just 24 hours later, Nora Roberts was daring to challenge the Roth supremacy, with the second book of her Irish trilogy, Shadow Spell, surging to second place. Self-publishing stalwart HM Ward also burst into 14th spot with the third book of The Proposition series.