#2 (the water color) is not exactly right, it’s just a mockup of something Miss M did when she was attempting to sell books on Instagram. (Turns out she can sell tie dye there but not books.)

It should be something more like this, or maybe scaled a bit smaller, and with the appropriate words.

Which would make the better cover? #1 which is the current cover of Miss Missy’s School. Or #2 a cropped section of the feature water color illustration you may have seen here a few times?

I think we all know the answer to that question.

So, how do I get from #1 to #2?

Easy! Pay the book formatting people some money.

When I set up the Tip Jar about a year and a half ago, I was really embarrassed to ask for contributions. No longer! As I have been scrolling through Big Food, paying attention to the old posts that random people find, and working on, e.g., the Holiday Hot Drinks series (not to mention Clementine Paddleford’s How America Eats), and the stats, history, old books, and occasional rants, I’ve come to realize there are some amazing posts here! Geeze. I forgot about the weather. I write them because I enjoy researching and writing them (it’s good for me), but it’s not too much to ask for a tip from you every now & again.

Rough calculations on the low side show that I need about $460 to have the covers (hardback and paperback) redesigned, and at least $400 to publish an eBook. And that total doesn’t include fixing a handful of typos that have come to my attention. There are not that many typos, but each costs money to fix, and it costs to upload a new corrected pdf to IngramSpark.

So let’s call it a cool $1000 total– but do it in stages. A new cover would hopefully generate new sales just in virtue of the book having a more pleasing cover. So we’ll start with a first goal of $460. That’s only 92 of you Dear Readers chipping in five bucks each.

Seriously? How can you say no to Tiger the Cat?