*Sometimes Lovin’ is Hurtful* has great reviews, dismal sales. While the experts tell me that in the digital world it is the cover that attracts potential readers to look further, I don’t need the experts to tell me that. I know it firsthand from my own experiences.

The cover for *Sometimes* has posed distinct challenges. I’ve struggled to design a cover both appealing to readers, yet true to the story itself. The problem comes in that *Sometimes* is a M/M romance. But it is not a romance in the way you think about romances.

There are two central characters. Bob Newell is completely straight and Blaine Shirer totally gay. Early on Bob asks Blaine if he could spend the night. Blaine protests that it might mess up a budding friendship. Bob counters, "I want to hold and be held." That one sexual encounter severs the nascent friendship. It is never repeated. *Sometimes* is, though, a love-song.


The first cover I designed included three elements important to the story. There was the bare-chested hunk, the meme for a romance. There was the starry sky, suggestive of a transcendent element. And there was a watercolor, not a photograph, of swallows, suggestive of the extra-natural elements recurrent throughout the story. While I think it well captured the novel, the in-your-face male physicality shooed away a large portion of the intended audience: sophisticated, literate readers, man and woman, straight and gay. This cover, which gathered slim interest, went through a couple of permutations.


Then I tried a complete change with a dark, depressing photo of a dumpy room with a single bed. There was a little bird sitting on the windowsill and the two line epigraph from *Richard III*. I tried it both with and without the torso of the hunk. Neither version enticed the would-be reader.


The current iteration is light, almost ethereal which, I think, captures the transfiguration at the end where Bob and Blaine continue their lives and their work together on the other side. “Work?! Well that’s good! I couldn’t just sit around all day singing hymns. And besides, work makes a man feel good about himself.”

*Sometimes* is a difficult novel to characterize, and thus difficult to design a cover for. It is genre-bending. From its opening Prologue (a dog speaking with God), to its Epilogue (Bob’s father inquiring at the gates of Florida State Prison if there was anyone he could speak to about his son’s death), it is authentic fiction. Someday it’ll break through. It’s an explosive novel, highly dramatic and tackling the big issues. Societal, psychological and metaphysical. I just hope I’m still here to see it.