As the work on my next novel is drawing to a conclusion, I’ve once again started the process of getting its cover created. This time, however, I do not have to find an artist to do the creating since I already have worked with a truly talented and wonderful artist, who made the cover for Dead Man’s Hand. So I reached out to her, and I started the process for my new cover. And as I filled out the project form for my new book, I couldn’t help but think about the entire journey I went through bringing the cover for my first book to life.
One of the significant differences in these two journeys is that while I always had a rough idea of what I wanted for Dead Man’s Hand, this time I had no such picture in my mind. The other was that when I started working on my first book’s cover had no idea who I would end up using as an artist, so I turned to Google and found a few artists. Ultimately I lucked out and found Leah Kaye Suttle fairly early on, as I said before she is a talented and fantastic artist. As I worked with her, I found her to be entirely professional from the initial contact to the very end of the project.
She kept me involved with each and every step of making sure I was delighted with each and every little change. Now all I had given her was the basic shape of the cover I wanted, it wasn’t much, but it was all I had at the time. Once she had it though she ran with it and made her first revision. When I saw it, I was blown away by what I saw. She delivered on what I said I wanted the cover to look like but she had added something wonderful. She placed the core image right on top of a background of another player and a field of green from a poker table.
We did have some back and forth for some minor things, but I had fallen in love with the cover she had presented to me. And just like that, I had a cover for my book, and of course, I was eagerly showing it off to all of my friends and family. I’m sure everyone who say it gave me a response, but the only response that has stuck with me was my friend’s. “It looks like a book cover.”
Those five simple words may not look like much and in all honesty, his response kind of brought me down for a moment. But once my friend explained what he meant by those five simple words my joy was once more dialed up to an eleven. When he looked at the new cover, he saw something that every book and nothing seemed out of place. So I remember looking down at this image and thinking that I now had something that proved that I was about to become a published author. I had a book cover. And I couldn’t be happier with the results.
I’m sure I will end up having a similar reaction as I go through the process for my new novel and my collection of short stories. I can hardly wait until I can see the completed covers, I feel like a child on Christmas Eve.