Like I mentioned last week, I am going to be posting once a week. For now, at least. Over the past week, I have gotten almost 1,000 visits to my page! I want to throw a shoutout to my team, my family, and my friends for supporting me in writing Only Time Will Tell, and creating this blog. I also want to give a shout out to you! Because of you, my blog’s statistics are going through the roof! Thanks to each and every one of you for sharing, liking, and subscribing!
In the last week, I haven’t gotten many sales. What I will do to fix that is I am going to lower the prices of my books. Instead of 15 for the paperback, it will be 10. Instead of 25 for the hardcover, it will be 15. I also have chosen to change the cover of the book. This won’t be the first time, but the new cover will hopefully help make sales happen. The new cover is displayed with this post and I hope you enjoy it. You can also see the whole cover on my, ‘How Do I Buy Your Book?‘ page. By the way, I drew this cover myself. I should mention that this new cover was the same as when I first published this book.
When I published the book, I was proud of the cover I designed. That was until I spoke with some of my friends and they had the idea to make a new cover design. They also suggested to put up a poll on social media to see what the readers wanted the new cover design to be. I looked over each and every submission from both my friends and the people on social media. I did see a few that looked nice, but none of them stuck. I looked again to see if I missed something. As I was scrolling, I chose about 5-10 submissions and looked them over. But I didn’t see anything that really inspired me. But the next day, I had an idea.
I was going to take the submissions that I chose and try to combine them. What I did next was print all of the images and hang them up on my bulletin board to see all of them at the same time. I used my brain to create a cover design inspired by John, a character in Only Time Will Tell, to kind of give people a glimpse of what the book was about. I grabbed my sketch pad and started drawing. But I kept tearing the papers out and throwing them away.
I stopped drawing and thought about how people would show others that a person was missing. I watched t.v. shows, nothing. I read other books, nothing. I then realized that in recent history, 5-20 years, they primarily get advertised on t.v. as an amber alert. I asked my parents how people would get the word out about their missing child when they were younger. They couldn’t think of anything. About a week later, my mom tells me that when she was a little kid, she would see missing people flyers on milk cartons.
That made me think. I grabbed my sketch pad and I drew what I thought it should have looked like. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. What I did next was go to my computer and re-design the drawing in a digital format. After a few hours, I thought that I did it. But when I looked at pictures of milk cartons with missing flyers on it online, I realized that I needed to add a picture to show what “John” looked like.
The problem is, I needed to get legal permission to use a picture of someone, and that is not easy. It would take months to get everything finished and published. I talked to my team and they saved me the trouble of having to wait months to get everything done by using a picture of myself instead. I took that idea and made it happen. I took an old photo of me, removed the background, turned it black and white, and added it to the cover design. After all of that, I had my new book cover.
The new updates to my book will be live tomorrow! January 8th, 2026 10 AM EST. I hope you enjoy the updated cover design! Also, before I forget. Don’t forget to comment any suggestions, ideas, or questions!
‘Till next time!
-Gregg
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