Cover up!

I enjoy mocking up covers for my stories, even before the stories themselves are ready for publication. Sometimes the covers help to crystallise my thoughts on how the story needs to be refined, and help me focus on key elements that I highlight in the cover.

I’m no artist, but I flatter myself that I know my type and have a reasonable grasp of the Adobe tools.

In this case, the aspects I want to emphasise are:

  • the protagonist, Jane, who is a little weird
  • the wild countryside of the north Midlands
  • the looming presence of those from the other side of the sky
  • and some hints that it is not contemporary
This one came closest after a preliminary search.

There are other elements in the story, but I don’t think they would catch the eye to the same extent. I wanted a face and a figure. People respond to faces on book covers. Looking through royalty-free photos, I found nothing I really felt was suitable.

But the problem is that it was too modern. That’s not an 18th-century face. It stares at you and grabs you, but doesn’t go with the long subtitle.

The single eye seems a bit odd to me as well. So I went searching.

LeBrun self-portrait

So, Wikipedia has a lot of her paintings, including this delightful self-portrait:

And also this:

Unnamed young girl

And this is what I came up with:

I made the image monochrome other than the eyes, which I made very saturated green, and placed it to one side, with a good deal of transparency.

But it still didn’t look right to me, so I moved the title and increased the font size.

Probably not the final version

Almost certainly it will not be the final cover, but it does give me inspiration to continue and get the book out. Here’s a little bit of what the book is about:

Making a steampunk book…

This is one of my favourite books from the point of view of the physical design of the book. Originally, it was two separate paperback volumes, The Untime and The Untime Revisited (both of which are still available as ebooks – check them out here), but I decided to combine them into one print volume, since one is a very clear sequel to the other.

I had some designs which I’d used for the cover of the original, but I preferred to take a completely different tack on this, and to try to recreate the feeling of a 19th-century book using 21st century technology. Steampunk publishing, if you will. Continue reading “Making a steampunk book…”

It’s new font time…

Anyone who knows anything about the booky side of me knows that I love fonts. I try not to be too gimmicky about them and I avoid a lot of the “script” and “brush” fonts, as I’m not really a graphic designer doing posters, but I do try to find a font for a book body that suits the content.

For example…

Continue reading “It’s new font time…”