At the moment I am nearly two weeks late in finishing my current project. That's my personal deadline, not one that's imposed on me from outside, which can be both good and bad.
The story is the first of the next romance trilogy that takes place on the Tohay Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I am at that stage, and have been for several weeks of saying, I'm about 5,000 to 8,000 words from the end. No matter how many words I write - and there have been at least five thousand in that time, I don't feel any closer to the end. My sister told me she has a similar issue when she gets close to finishing a tapestry. There always seem to be that last few inches that never get any shorter.
Today, I realized I had no idea about what the covers looked like for the books. Maybe it was the sympathetic words, or maybe my creative voice needed a break, or maybe it was nothing more than procrastination. Whatever it was, and I know there'll be a big vote for procrastination, I jumped onto my image library and began browsing.
When I first started creating my own covers, I was more focused on finding something that related to the story, and spent hours searching and considering and mostly discarding images before I found something I thought appropriate. Then I realized no-one cares. Most prospective readers, usually subconsciously, get a feel from the cover as to genre and content. If the cover shows a spaceship against the blackness of space, a science fiction space opera is a good bet. Similarly, a loving couple with curly text font like Satisfy, promises a romance, but what sort of romance?
As a rule of thumb, the more bare skin you see on the cover, the spicier the romance. That's not to say that a romance cover where both characters are clothed isn't going to involve some sex. What will upset readers is if you have scantily clad characters on the cover and the story is a sweet no-spice romance. The chance of repeat sales there is very low.
Because the Tohay Romance Trilogy is a follow on from The Serpent Romance Trilogy, the covers are relatively easy - author name and title in the same location on all covers, and in the same font. I had to tweak some of the colors because of the image backgrounds but that was about all. The hardest part was coaxing Apple Preview to remove the background of an image so I could use the characters against a different background. Even then it only took about an hour to generate four genre appropriate covers.
Now, if only the actual stories co-operate.