The Cover Design

Well it's looking like they were not able to get ellenclary.com unfortunately though I need to double check. It's likely I will use ellenclary.org. ellenclary.com is just sitting there parked on the internet.

A few things I need to blog about on the publishing process. One big back and forth was the cover design. I filled out some information on what I wanted it to look like. One huge requirement of mine is that the cover had to be drawn and not based on stock photography. This is science fiction where you almost never see photographs. It's always drawings. After some internal debate at the publisher they asked me if it would be ok to split the cost of hiring an illustrator as doing so would put us over budget. I readily agreed once I saw the website of the illustrator. He's really good and his name is Ben Perini.

Then I gave them a description of what I had in mind and I even took photos of myself in scenes I have envisioned. I forgot to tell them that the character is a little slimmer than me and taller, so we had to go through that revision but the scene he came up with was good.

A few things I didn't realize. The scene has to be a night time scene. I said: "But they usually work during the day." The coordinator assured me that if it were during the day it would just look like a woman taking her dog on a walk. Oh. Ok, so forget verisimilitude. That works.

Then there were assumptions that wouldn't work for the world I created. She was carrying a flashlight. What? No, if anything it would be a headlamp. Then she was carrying a leash. No that's not right. Telepathic dogs. They usually didn't use leashes except for show. Then the shoes didn't look right, oh and stop tucking in the pants. This isn't the military. I'm still not thrilled with the text, but I decided after some tweaks that I needed to stop and just let them work.

After lots of back and forth suddenly there was a cover that I liked. It was actually very cool to see. It looked like an actual book.