I’ve been working with great publisher Cemetery Dance for awhile, and today they posted the new cover that I did for author Ray Garton‘s new book Dereliction. Go check out the limited release here, and order it. I’ll wait…
Now that you’re back, we can talk about the cover a bit more. Well, at least I can.
I love working on Ray’s books, and with Cemetery Dance. Not only are they great folks aside from what they do, they also are great with suggestions on how to proceed. But not so much that they force any issues, they really let an artist work with the ideas and come up with something.
In this case, Dereliction isn’t the most straightforward story (though it really is great). Without giving anything away, there’s no real moment that lends itself to a visual cover. Much of the story is about a mystery that can’t be given away, and much of the rest is about emotion over event.
So, you have different ideas that could easily conflict, and any one of them detracts from the ideas behind the others. I decided to mix them altogether, into a multi-layered view.
By layering the ideas, between the varying emotions of the lead character, the events of dreams, and the overall “broken” idea, I came up with a cover that shows them all. Yet, it’s also designed to link them as well, as they are in the story.
Here’s the final version, though the text may look different once it’s published (click on it, and all of the images below, to make them larger):
I also created a slightly different version, with the main character in the blue area. However, I think, while it works well as “art”, as a cover it busies up the works some. We all agreed that having the text, versus the guy in the blue, just simply works better. But here it is:
Which is just something that happens in publishing sometimes, and it’s why I like to have a couple of ideas ready. In case you are interested, here’s what it looks like without the text or the guy:
