Here's the New Problem: Where Do I Put All Four of the Awards Stickers on the Book Cover?

 

Here's what it looks like with just two stickers. Now what?

Every writer's dream is to write something that wins awards. If you work very hard and are very lucky, this can actually happen. It happened to me after many decades of I-don't-care-if-I-never-get-published-I'm-going-to-keep-writing writing. A short story of mine was finally published, soon after, another won an international writing competition in Paris, and then, years after after that, a novel was accepted and years after that after two more novels. Then, the next one, the fourth one, the one pictured above, won a finalist award in ForeWord Reviews national book awards. 

So far, where to put the sticker was pretty easy: lower right hand corner will do fine. Then, last week, I learned that the book has been selected as as finalist in three categories in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards (Fiction-Adventure, Fiction-Historical, and Fiction-Young Adult). Of course, I was excited and in fact, blown away, and  so set about deal with a small, lovely problem: Where to put four awards stickers on the cover.

This is what I have so far, with just two of them on there. The New Mexico-Arizona stickers are big but, really, I'd like to show off all four of them. I mean, you've got to promote your books. I now see this will be impossible unless I want to cover up the cover, pretty much completely. I'll have to wait until the ultimate winners in the New Mexico-Arizona awards are announced on November 15 before I cover up too much of too many books. If lightning strikes and I actually win the gold, maybe those stickers will be smaller.

Bear with me on this.