The second release of 2017 is ready for pre-order at Amazon. Here’s the cover art in all it’s glory. Another stellar effort from my brother, Byron!
Go forth and purchase if you must. It will be delivered on Tuesday, 18 July 2017.
The second release of 2017 is ready for pre-order at Amazon. Here’s the cover art in all it’s glory. Another stellar effort from my brother, Byron!
Go forth and purchase if you must. It will be delivered on Tuesday, 18 July 2017.
One of the best parts about being a self-published author is getting to do your own covers. Most writers don’t want anything to do with the process. But for me, I see it as a great way to showcase my model building hobby. I’ve always built plastic models since the time I was a kid. When I was a teenager my buddies and I would scratch build our own models from cardboard and bits of broken kits we had on hand. They were pretty cool for the time but limited to what we could scrape together with our allowances. We drew hundreds of drawings of starships we never got around to building for a Sci-Fi epic I was slowly writing. Skip forward about thirty years and now I’m writing novels about those starships and those novels need cover art.
About the time I started writing these novels I picked up my scratch modeling hobby again only this time I could afford to make them the same way they used to be made in Hollywood when I was a kid. The only tough part now was figuring out how to arrange them on a cover in such a way that would make someone want to buy the book. For this I enlisted the talents of my graphic artist brother, Byron. Byron takes the elements of each model, combines them with cool backgrounds and effects and then overlays the titles on them. He makes the models come alive as if they were real.
For my latest novel, Corvette, it all started with a thumbnail I did in Gimp using a model of a Votainion warship that I already had and a stand in model for the yet to be built corvette.
I knew we were going with orange and blue for the main colors of this series so I used those colors for the titles. It’s crude but it lets Byron know what I want without actually drawing it. Sometimes I do start with sketched but this time I just hacked together stock images of similar models to get the idea across.
Meanwhile, I had to build the actual corvette model and you know, write the book. The model was scratch built using a drawing I did based on the SS Sokol model featured on other Star Saga novels. It was built to the same scale as the Votainion warship model – 1/350. Below you can see it coming together on my workbench some time last year. For a complete account of this build please check out this post.
The Votainion warship was sketched out years ago and built a few years back for the first few books of the series. Here’s what the original sketch looked like below.
Here is a shot of the larger model under construction. For a more detailed look at how I built this model please check out this post.
Here are both models being photographed against blue screen for the cover of Corvette. I use a Canon digital SLR to photograph the models in high resolution then hand off the images to Byron for Photoshoping.
This is the first attempt at the cover using the new corvette model and the older warship model. I chose a green background because in the novel, the sh
First version with new Corvette model. This was another Gimp thumbnail that I did and the colors are all washed out so we could focus on placement of the ships.
I decided to try a different direction, using the Gimp paint filter. I was hoping this would produce an image that looked painted. But after examining it we decided it made the Votainion warship look like it was sculpted out of clay. I also tried making the larger ship bigger and that didn’t quite look right either.
Below is Byron’s first green nebula and laser guns. Author name has the wrong font. I had to explain that the corvette used a rail gun instead of an energy gun so we would have to change the red lasers. Also, we wondered if the background needed to be green or not, so I had him try a blue background.
We tested the blue background with random folks and everyone seemed to prefer the green so we dropped blue.
The cover was nearly complete at this point when I realized three major issues. First of all, the corvette looked better at an angle in front of the warship for giving the cover depth. Secondly, the author name was in the wrong font. And thirdly, the rail gun rounds just didn’t pop.
After those changes were made, the cover seemed to pop right out and demand your attention. So we left it alone and went to press with it.
This process took the better part of a year to complete and was started about the same time the book. I had to build a model at the same time as I wrote the novel, which is not unusual and affords me a great visual aide while writing. I think the finished cover is one of our best yet and should help sell the novel and bring in readers to the series. If you purchase the paperback of the novel the cover really shines with a glossy cover.
Corvette is available to purchase Tuesday, March 21st from Amazon as a Kindle ebook and a paperback.
This past weekend the cover for my next released novel, The Rising has been finalized. I thought I’d share with you some of the final little tweaks we did to it. Big thanks to my brother Byron McConnell for once again pulling all the elements together in Photoshop and making them shine!
The above version had five important design changes. The First was the yellow flame out the back of the top fighter. The second was the new explosion. The third was the canopy glass on the bottom fighter, and the fourth change was the motion blur added to the green fighter and the bottom fighter. The fifth design change was to punch up the brightness of the stars.
In the above version we changed the color of the top fighter’s exhaust back to blue, realizing that the yellow didn’t fit our stated blue and orange color guide and it conflicted with the yellow of the green fighter’s leading edge. The two lower models didn’t have motion blur and looked static to me. Also the canopy glass was not yet applied to the bottom fighter. The explosion in this version was not as dynamic as the first one either. The stars are not as bright in this version and it was determined that when you looked at the cover in smaller sizes, the stars faded away entirely.
For the final version of the cover we merged the best of the above versions into a single version. So now you have the blue flame of the top fighter, the more dynamic explosion and the motion blur of the middle and bottom fighters. The canopy glass on the bottom fighter is reflecting the explosion which makes it more realistic.
Here’s a quick look back at how the cover evolved over time from my original sketch.
My original sketch was inspired by model airplane box cover art from WWII which usually depicted aircraft dog fighting in dramatic fashion. I still had the series banner at the top the same way it appeared on the older coin covers.
Above we see a finished version of the initial sketch. We decided that the title should be on one line and that we didn’t need to keep the series banner.
So I did this format change to make the textual parts more clean. All of the books in the Star Saga would now conform to this template for the cover title, saga title and author name.
I added a third fighter in the foreground to help add interest and show the fighter who shot down the green fighter. Now the battle depicts the good guys winning the engagement. The bottom fighter was eventually swapped out for a better model of the Vicker’s Victory fighter. Actually, both Alliance fighters would eventually be the same newly created plastic version with more details.
You can see what was involved with building the two models used on this cover in the Model Builds section of this blog.
Next month I’ll be releasing the second novella set in the Star Saga’s Starforgers Trilogy. It’s a coming of age story about the young Empress Nykostra of Voton. Set between book’s two and three, the story deals with how the Empress rose from a guarded youth to a powerful leader of the largest stellar empire. It works great as a stand alone story but if you’re reading the saga books, it fills in some gaps that avid readers will appreciate.
Here’s the cover art by my brother, Byron McConnell. It features an image of Mars standing in for Con One and the KiV-4 trainer model in 1/48 scale. The color scheme for the series is orange and blue with orange denoting the Empire and blue the Alliance. This story being all about the Empire, it’s mostly orange. Where as Devon’s Blade is mostly about the Alliance and so it predominately blue.
The Blood Empress goes on sale next month, so stay tuned for the release date. In the meantime, go snag your copy of Devon’s Blade and then leave reviews everywhere you hang out online. Thanks!