I’m excited to announce that The Darkening Dream recently won some International Book Awards, including:
Winner: Best Cover Design- Fiction
and
Finalist: Fiction- Fantasy
I want to offer a shout out to my collaborators who helped with this: The cover artist Cliff Nielsen and cover designer Pete Garceau as well as my brilliant and hard working editors.
Find out more about the cover or the book.
The “beta” of The Darkening Dream‘s Trade Paperback cover has come in and I submitted another proof. With any luck I might get it on sale next week, the week after for sure. The interior layout has been complete for almost a week too. I can’t wait to see this puppy in the flesh. It should look great.
You can see some of the old paper test versions below. My long standing Lulu (ick) ARC on the left and an older CreateSpace proof on the right. Even with that hybrid cover the CS proof is looking and feeling great.
Apple also finally turned on my iBooks account today and so the iBookstore version should be up in… well however long it takes them to approve it. Given that it took ten days just to validate the account it might not be instant. All the sites except for Amazon and slow slow slow. For example, I uploaded the new cover to Barnes and Noble a week ago and it still hasn’t updated!
Even after the product launch has begun, I’m still tinkering — and such is the way of it in the new world of agile product development. My current cover (to the left) now has an awesome image, but the overall effect isn’t quite bookish enough. So in the interest of total transparency (or mind numbing boredom?) I’ll continue to let you in on these intermediate steps of the creative process.
My cover designer, Pete Garceau, has whipped up a couple concept sketches. To the right is a darker colored take and below one in the original color scheme. You can click them to embiggen.
These are NOT in any way finished. Just concepts.
What I want to know for you, reader, is:
1. Which color scheme do you like, and why?
2. Your opinion of The Darkening Dream font/logo?
Please let me know in the comments!
Discover more about my novel, The Darkening Dream here or on all sorts of other links in the left sidebar.
It’s worth noting, that in the specialized world of book design the book designer (interior), the cover designer (logo design cover layout), and the illustrator (who paints the image on the cover) are sometimes all different people!
NOTE: I updated this post at 10:43am PST with slightly newer takes on the covers. The “older” two can be found here and here.
