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The Hunt, by Paul Elard Cooley

“Tony Downs has a gift enabling him to see into the minds of others. After his sister’s murder, the telepath purses those responsible and finds himself in a fight for his life.” (via the description on Amazon.com)

The first in a series of stories, the cover for The Hunt had to set the look and feel for all subsequent stories. It’s always a challenge to do the first in a series, especially when you know you’re the one that will be doing the following ones. You have to give a lot of thought to the main elements that will have to be repeated, modified, or changed out. Color and text are other factors to consider. While the fonts should remain consistent, color is more flexible. You can decide to keep the color the same, which can be another series identifier, but this can have limitations on the other imagery you use or may require a lot of extra work to get the colors across the series to match, depending on what it’s composed of. I’ve found that keeping certain elements, like font and specific image details (in this case the face close up with the eye), it gives you greater flexibility on color. For the Tony Downs series, I’ve decided to do a different color toning for each story, defined by story elements. For this one it had to be blue. Everything about it screamed blue. If you want an explanation of that, well, you should probably read the story. I generally try to pull out of the setting (time of day, weather, location) for keys to this, but it’s more of a gut feeling than anything else. Not sure how helpful that is, but that’s the best I got.

New technique! I was having some trouble with the text (shocking, I know), so I went Googling. Whenever I get stuck somewhere I start off with a general search, like “photoshop text effect” in this case. After browsing around I came across a YouTube video demonstrating this ghostly light emanation text effect and I knew I’d found the answer to my problem. Bonus: it was pretty easily accomplished using little besides the motion blur filter.

Another interesting element that will be carried across the series is the reflection in the eye. That one took me a bit because my initial attempts kept looking like a reflection in mirrored sunglasses, losing the details of the actual eyeball. Even with the awesome power of blending modes, some images just wouldn’t work for this. I ended up using a different face for the main character as it had everything to do with the high key (bright whites) of the eye of the first guy I used. This actually worked out well as I much prefer the angle of the face of the one I actually used.

The Hunt is the first of this series, but the second is already in the bag and waiting to go live. Watch this space for the next reveal!

Banshee Charmer, by Tiffany Allee (From the Files of the Otherworld Enforcement Agency)

From the Amazon descriptions:

Banshee Charmer:

“When she’s sent to a crime scene and finds her second dead woman in as many weeks, half-banshee detective Kiera “Mac” McLoughlin is convinced a serial killer is on the loose. Incubi are extinct, her boss insists. But what else can kill a woman in the throes of pleasure? When her partner is murdered after using witchcraft to locate the killer and Mac is thrown off the case, her frustration turns to desperation.

Certain the killer is an incubus, Mac works behind her department’s back to chase down slim, sometimes perilous leads. While the killer eludes her, she does discover handsome Aidan Byrne, an investigative counterpart from the enigmatic Otherworld Enforcement Agency. Mac typically runs her investigations fast and hard, but with Aidan at her side, she’s running this one “hot” as well. But Aiden knows more than he’s letting on—something that could shatter their blazing romance and add Mac to the killer’s growing body count…”

YOU GUYS! I am SO excited about these! These are the first of the covers I’ve designed for the powerhouse that is Entangled Publishing. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to be a part of this amazing team! Truly! If you’re a writer of Romance things, please, please consider submitting your work to them. They. Are. Amazing!

I spent many many many straight hours working on these, but I think the dedication has paid off. These three covers are proof positive that, yes, I AM a professional and just as good at what I do as others in the industry. It’s a big validation for me, but, moreover, they are lovely covers. And, really, that’s why I do what I do. Beautiful covers are SO important and really make all the difference in whether or not someone decides to pick up a book or not. Beautiful design is a REQUIREMENT. I love authors and I love good design. Badly dressed books make me sad.

To that end, I think I was successful with these three. These have good genre markers (they’re clearly Romance by the shirtless dudes and the dark shadows give a definite indication that they are paranormal/detective stories) and are most definitely series consistent. Each one has a slightly different color cast to differentiate one book from another, but the placement of the image elements are the same, as well as standardization of the font choices and placement. If you’re doing a series of books, that second thing is pretty vital. While there is a teensy bit of wiggle room on placement, the fonts are not negotiable.

I can’t say as there was a ton of difference for me in working with a publisher versus working with an independent author. The biggest thing would have to be that there are more levels of approval required (and thus more people to make changes) to finalize the project. Any client I work with expects solid work from me, authors and publishers alike, so I wasn’t surprised by the amount of tweaking I had to do to get these up to snuff. No, really. Not surprised at all. No one gets it 100% right the first time. There are ALWAYS changes. Always.

There is one more forthcoming in this series, but I have zero information on when that will be or anything about it. Also, I have one more cover for Entangled that has yet to be released, but will likely drop this month also.

Comments always welcome!

The Dreamer’s Thread, by Starla Huchton

“Everyone Dreams.

The Grey Moon, by Timothy P. Callahan

“Hello, my name is Alex Johnson, AJ to my friends, and this is a story on how I ruined my life and my marriage. Liz and I thought we’d have the perfect life on the moon, her working as a computer programmer, me working as a teleoperator. We were wrong, so very wrong. Living in a world where all you do is work then go home can be boring to a guy like me. Add to that a wife who will stop at nothing to get ahead and another woman who wants to be more than friends and you have an explosive mix that blew up in my face. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Listen to my story, see what happened, and don’t hate me when it’s over.” (via the description on Smashwords)

Literary fiction meets science fiction? Challenge accepted!

How do you combine two genres into one cover? Well, this is one way to do it. Firstly, I tried to limit the color palette. Given the title, using muted tones really made the most sense. Secondly, even though this is partially science fiction, I stayed away from using a lot of tech in this one. Yes, it takes place on the moon, and yes, they live in the future, but as this story also feels like literary fiction, it was important to keep the focus on what was important about the story: the characters.

If you look at the other cover I did for Mr. Callahan, you’ll note that I gave a similar treatment to the people featured on this cover. I wanted this to give potential readers who like the author’s other work a reason not to shy away from this tale, even though the subject matter is a little different. These two are dissimilar enough so as not to be considered in the same series, but they certainly won’t look bad when displayed side by side.

I kept the fonts straightforward so as not to distract from the image, and this moonscape is actually a NASA photograph from the first moon landing. I had to give it a hint of color toning (if you look carefully you can see it’s not a true grayscale image, but has a slight yellow cast) to blend it with the other images used here. True grayscale looks unnatural as the human eye doesn’t typically see it outside of printed words and images. So if you ever find yourself having to do something similar for a cover, keep that in mind.

I think the simplicity of this image is pretty effective. A little goes a long way with book covers. It’s all about balance and this one fell into place rather nicely.

****UPDATE****

This cover was featured on indieebookcovers.com for January 2013’s cover contest! It’s such an honor to be seen amongst other pretty covers and even be nominated for such a thing! The judge’s comments were just lovely:

“The Gray Moon is intriguing with the eclipsed light and the moonscape. The darkness and light, the blues and grays, and the people required a multi-layered composite. The use of three is echoed over and over, which is amazing. Not an easy cover to design, and it’s been done with precision choreography. It has a retro sci-fi feel in a modern setting. It’s full of contrasts, but it’s subtle.”

While I didn’t win (and I’m totally fine with that btw), those comments really make me feel great about my work here. Thanks to whoever tipped off that blogger who chose this cover to compete!