About the Book
What I Love about the Cover
This cover is a great example of how to create tension in graphic design.
The colors and the water caught my attention first. Water is my happy place, so to me it seemed the perfect fit for something called “The Safe Place.” The image of the pool and the view is a beautiful, calm one.
But there are subtleties on this cover that build tension while you look at it — and that’s why I selected it.
The words of the title, The Safe Place, are partially underwater. And maybe I read too many psychological thrillers, but whenever I see a cover that suggests “safe”, I usually think it means the opposite.
When you combine it with the saying on the cover: “No Phones. No outsiders. No Escape.” something tugs, something feels not quite right with the beauty depicted here. At this point, I don’t know what it is — I haven’t read the description yet. But there’s a contrast here that keeps my attention and makes me want to know more.
If you think of a book cover as an ad (which it is), its sole job is to make the viewer pause, grab their attention, and want more information. This cover did the job of making me want to resolve that contrast, that tension of what should be a happy place but isn’t creating peace while I stare at it.
Let’s add the description to this. It starts with “Welcome to paradise…will you ever be able to leave?” That is a beautifully tense sentence. Run through the rest of the power words in this description and you see words like mess, lost, problem, perfect, remote, beautiful, enchanted, dangerous, secrets, consequences, and deadly.
That’s exactly the experience I would expect to get when I open the pages. Cover well done.
About the Book
Welcome to paradise…will you ever be able to leave?
Emily is a mess. Emily Proudman just lost her acting agent, her job, and her apartment in one miserable day.
Emily is desperate. Scott Denny, a successful and charismatic CEO, has a problem that neither his business acumen nor vast wealth can fix. Until he meets Emily.
Emily is perfect. Scott offers Emily a summer job as a housekeeper on his remote, beautiful French estate. Enchanted by his lovely wife Nina, and his eccentric young daughter, Aurelia, Emily falls headlong into this oasis of wine-soaked days by the pool. But soon Emily realizes that Scott and Nina are hiding dangerous secrets, and if she doesn’t play along, the consequences could be deadly.
