The High Road cover reveal
Getting a cover for a book I’ve written is well beyond feeling like a “kid in a candy store.” For The High Road it was closer to Christmas morning… if you’d spent months and months living the creation of what you’re going to use your present for… and if you’d sent off your Wish List knowing this Santa Claus was guaranteed to read it and use all his skill to make you the perfect toy.
Yeah, it’s that cool. If it works.
Since I’d already decided to spring for a full-value cover, one of the key questions became choosing the right St. Nick. And this step I simply lucked into. Friends at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society suggested one service that has a history of award-winning covers for fairly affordable prices: Damonza.com. Plus, when I began searching Joanna Penn’s suggestions for different designers at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/bookcoverdesign/, it didn’t hurt that Damonza was at the top of her long and varied list.
But the other part is planning just what I wanted in my cover. And, even though I had a first choice for a designer, working out my plans was the best way to check just how good they’d be.
Judging a Cover by its Book
So just where do you start, learning to see a stack of words as a single picture?
–Alright, let’s be honest. It’s more, how do you un-see all the pictures you’ve got and find what parts of them really matter?
As a reader (geek and general crazy person) I’ve got a lifetime of colorful covers on my shelves, plus movies, TV, and comics for more exposure to what puts a story into a frame. The real work is backtracking from my assumptions and trying to find what a good designer needs.
(See what I always think of as the Engineer’s Question, from Spider Robinson’s Stardance: get past a user’s assumptions of what a thing should “be” and ask “What do you want it to do?”)
After asking friends, remembering author interviews, and digging around the net, I found that a lot of the best early-stage advice fits neatly into one handy blog post: Anna Lewis at Publishing Talk, http://www.publishingtalk.eu/self-publishing/four-steps-to-create-a-great-book-cover/. Her method begins with a “mood board” of related images, and a study of other covers of similar books.
–She continues the process with DIY steps for getting good images and learning how many formats the cover needs to be in. These would be the points where I’d switch from doing the work myself to helping out the designer and just checking how well they’d handle them.
Mood, and examples? The mood for The High Road was no secret to me: it’s all about thrills. In fact, it’s about taking that to the edge of desperation Mark and Angie have knowing that one gravity-controlling belt isn’t enough to put down an organized gang of enemies with worse things behind them.
Other covers? My search for good samples started on my own shelves, on Amazon genre lists, and on the scores of varied (and very awesome) covers on the Damonza site. A cover artist that doesn’t encourage you to think in terms of the other covers out there isn’t doing his job—but Damonza both asks and emphasizes the value of that, so points for them.
–Sub-point: Anna Lewis makes it clear that the covers to study have to be for the right genre; no matter how many dark alleys my characters use, they don’t see them the same way as an (earthbound) mystery hero does, and the cover shouldn’t either. And if you want to go deeper into that, check out the writer juggernaut Kristine Kathryn Rusch in her exploration of how to re-invent cover styles for a genre: http://kriswrites.com/2015/07/22/business-musings-the-branding-surprise/
What’s worth NINETY thousand words?
Now for the heart of it: what kind of image should the cover be?
(Note, that means images, not “what scene should it capture.” That’s another piece of advice that turns up often, how all the treasured specific moments in a book are usually too complex to make good cover material. It’s also another point Damonza makes very clear to a client.)
That might be the fastest choice I ever made about The High Road. This is a book about flying—it’s meant to be the book about someone flying. Sure there’s also Mark deep in the woods or racing through the hospital, or Angie’s signature gaze looking for a horizon, or her toppling a car… but who am I kidding?
Flying. Done.
But what kind of flying, and what other images are part of that?
And here can begin the most varied, complex, and fun part of cover planning: just how far you can mine your own imagination, but meshing it with someone who should know everything except the book itself far better than you. I already knew what a sweet surprise that could be when another designer helped me with Shadowed.
SHADOWED cover (not by Damonza)
For that cover (since I was young and bossy back then) I started with my own very specific concept. That one figure in the crowd that’s so much clearer than the others was my way to suggest how Paul’s senses can pick out a single target, and for all the secrets he’s trying to search through.
And yet, I never even thought of Paul in a hoodie, until this came back. No matter how much fun we writers have imagining a cover, a good designer is a true eye-opener.
The High Road had its own specific cover needs, even though I’d learned not to micromanage parts of it. I wanted to touch on its urban setting and especially its literally dark world—that Mark and Angie know better than to try flying by day and still keep the magic secret. But most of all, there was the problem of “the Superman silhouette:”
I admit, I’m a little smug about having written Damonza into a corner like this. If someone does look up and glimpse a shadow going by at night, generations of comic books mean anyone would at least recognize a human outline stretched out to slide through the air. In the book Angie (being Angie) naturally figured that out, and so when she or Mark fly it’s usually huddled up into a nondescript ball shape that’s easier to take for a balloon or a trick of shadow. But that’s hardly a good dramatic pose for a cover, so I suggested the moment of leaping up or landing might be more promising.
And of course, I was also explaining how Mark was only just learning to control the magic, and the frantic tone I try to build in my scenes.
What I got…
was THIS:
THE HIGH ROAD cover
One word: Squee!
(Or maybe: “Zha-daruath. Zha-daruath. Zha-daruath, dammit!” if I think of it as him just learning the magic.)
Mark, falling—or desperately dropping—out of the sky. And they did that without even hearing about Chapter Ten, and the moment where he makes a barely-controlled drop down the side of a skyscraper in search of his elusive enemy. (And it’s almost within a page of the section that was so central the first draft made it the flash-forwarded opening page.)
And it hints at the climax too, Mark in so much control that he finds he’s maneuvering around skyscrapers—
And there’s that hint of the nighttime action, but plenty of light to suggest the magic that’s carrying him (without it quite seeming like it’s a visible glow).
And—
And—
Wow.
There’s a reason for Damonza’s tagline: “Books made awesome.”
One part of me thinks it’s going to be a lot easier to make my next round of edits, to be sure the book is good enough for an image like this.
The other part hates slowing down. I just want to show this thing off, and start telling fans how many bits of the story I’m learning to see in it.