We’re Covered!

Last night, Kent completed the cover designs for all three volumes of the trilogy. We’re very proud of them (they’re gorgeous, in our unimpeachably unbiased opinion) and they bring us one very important step nearer to publishing the books.

We can’t wait to unveil these to the world. Stay tuned for the releases very soon!

The cover design project required about 60 hours, and produced a set of three coordinated designs. But it wasn’t anywhere close to an equal distribution of 20 hours per cover. The early stages of the process took up a disproportionate amount, and most of that went into searching stock photo libraries for the right base images to work from. Sites like Shutterstock have a seemingly infinite inventory, but we found it difficult to narrow things down to the right images. Eventually we decided to stop burning time on image searches and instead burn it on photo manipulation. Kent’s Photoshop kung-fu, accumulated over years of professional design experience, was up to the challenge.

Most authors don’t design their own covers. The publisher typically handles that, but if you’re self publishing then that puts it right back on your plate and you need to budget for art and graphic design services.  A strong cover is essential, so this is not a place to wing it. In our case, design skills came along as part of the partnership package so it made sense to capitalize on them and get the covers we really wanted.

Every partnership is unique, and the background of each partner confers knowledge that can be leveraged — whether that’s in the form of subject matter, story structure, process, mechanics, or production.