I have a thing for covers.
C’mon, admit it — you do too.
Jim C. Hines is probably the luckiest author I know when it comes to getting great covers. Well, maybe he’s tied with Carrie Jones, hers are awesome as well.
I’ve had some covers I loved and some I was less fond of. Over the past week or so I’ve had my work included in two new publications, which means two new covers. I adore these two, so I thought I’d share them with you. I especially love them because they are so different from one another, but each publication contains one of my zombie poems.
Firstly we have Eclectic Flash. One of my poems, Cover Up, is included in the most recent issue of Eclectic Flash. Check out this cover:
Because they use a flash player to provide their free online issue I had to take a screenshot, which means the quality isn’t as good here as it is at the website. Not by a long shot. You should click on the picture to go to the website and see for yourself. I adore that cover, it’s so cute!
I also have a poem (titled White Noise) in a spiffy new zombie anthology:
I also love this cover. The cartooniness (if it’s not a word it should be) is pretty sweet 🙂
Two very different covers, but I like them both. What do you think? Also, do you have a favourite book cover of all time? Share the love, I wanna see it 🙂
I guess you could say that I have a thing for composing cover art. My art has appeared on the covers of a handful of zines (ABANDONED TOWERS, BEYOND CENTAURI, BARDS AND SAGES QUARTERLY, KIDS’MAGINATION), as well as a couple of poetry books published by Sam’s Dot Publishing (BRUSHFIRES by David C. Kopaska-Merkel and UNDER THE ASH by Shelly Bryant). My art was to have been on the cover of a short story collection being published by another publisher, but the author withdrew the collection from publication. He may yet see the book published elsewhere, so my art may yet adorn the cover of his collection. It depends on what happens.
Out of the covers you posted, i like the zombie one better. I think it’s more eye-catching. Black and white art is fine, but I think colour works better for cover art.
As for my favourite book cover, I always liked the art Tolkien himself did for his books. I have a 1986 edition of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING which features Tolkien’s “Hobbiton-Across-The-Water’ on the cover. I know it is only a landscape, and perhaps not as exciting as other examples of cover art, but I always liked the quaint feeling of another time and place displayed by that painting:
http://mysite.verizon.net/aznirb/mtr/oop/ballant_tolk_cov.html
(the link is to an earlier edition of the books which featured Tolkien’s artwork on the covers)
Other book covers I love – the covers of the 1980s Del Rey printings of the works of H. P. Lovecraft featuring the art of Michael Whelan:
http://www.abebooks.com/book-search/author/lovecraft-h-p-howard-phillips-michael-whelan-cover-art/
Thank you for sharing those links, Richard 🙂 It’s also interesting to hear about covers from the perspective of the artist. Do the publishers usually tell you what they want for the covers specifically, or not so much? When Marge does art for Niteblade she actually reads the work and then illustrates them as she sees fit, I don’t try to be instructive at all, so I’m curious 🙂
Short answer: it depends.
Long answer: different editors and publishers operate differently. Plus, each situation may be different.
The details may differ from project to project. When I was assigned the cover art for Shelly Bryant’s collection, I was given the text and asked to come up with something that matched Shelly’s poetry. However, when I was assigned the cover art for David C. Kopaska-Merkel’s collection, I was given the title and the fact that it was a collection of speculative poetry, and nothing more. My cover for the BRUSHFIRES collection was created without me ever having read the poetry in the collection!
When I did the cover art for the book that the author has since withdrawn from publication at a certain publisher’s, I composed an image based on a specific story in the collection. The author had requested that I illustrate that story for the cover. He even requested a few specific details regarding what he wished to see in the image.
The artworks of mine that have appeared on different zine covers have been unsolicited submissions. I create images that I hope will fit with the theme of the zines, although I try to leave the imagery general enough that it might fit at more than one venue, should the first venue turn it down. Some of the images are actually illustrations of my own poetry, while others are simply images I come up with completely separately from the imagery in my written works. In purpose-made cover art, I try and leave enough space for the zine title and other cover text.
When I illustrate stories and poems written by other authors, I read the works and pick what images from those works seem to work best for illustrating. I typically have free reign when deciding what to show; I don’t usually get told “show this” or “show that”.