In my blog of a few weeks ago, “Judging a book by its cover,” I mentioned that we’d just completed our inventory list and were evaluating our covers.

Well, we’ve done that and more in the past few weeks, holding meeting after meeting to discuss how to approach books in various genres and what we want our covers to “feel” like.

That’s a pretty abstract concept, “feel.” It’s hard to explain to your coworkers, let alone to your readers and booksellers, but I’ve had a lot of practice over the past few weeks, and here’s what I’ve come up with…

The “feel” of a publishing company’s cover designs are similar to the signature style of an artist or a photographer. Think about it: you can probably look at your favorite artists’ work and identify it without needing to see the name. Whatever you think about the art itself, photographs by Annie Leibovitz, glass art by Dale Chihuly, paintings by Thomas Kincade, to name a few, all have a recognizable, iconic style. Each piece is different, but the “feel” of the piece gives a clue to its artist.

Well, book covers should be pieces of art, too. You should be able to pick up a book and get a “feel” for the author and the house it’s published in.

And that’s what we’re working on now at WMG. As I begin my third month at the helm, I feel like we’re making some great progress, and I promise we’ll continue to replace those old, let’s-just-get-this-thing-up covers with what I hope you’ll think are great-looking new ones. Covers that “feel” like WMG covers. Creative, attractive, clean covers.

I’ve attached a few of our new ones to this post. One of our authors, Dean Wesley Smith, talked about this on his own blog last week, too. He’s very pleased with our progress, and we are, too.

But in the end, you, our readers, will be the judge.

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Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.