My cover artist and brother, Byron and I are designing the cover for my next novel, The Rising. It’s the second book of the Star Saga and we’re changing things up a bit from the first, fourth and seventh books. Sorry if that’s confusing. We’ve already released the first book in each of the three trilogy’s of the saga. Anyway, we’re going to make the entire background be a star field and do away with the marble slabs. It’s not that we didn’t like the slabs, its just that we think the second and third books in each trilogy should be different.
When viewed on the reader’s book shelf, the series will visually identify itself if the first book in each trilogy has the marble, concrete and steel look. The other two books in each trilogy will have star fields on their spines. How can you plan such an elaborate look for books that won’t be written for years into the future? Well, why not? I’m indie publishing this saga so I don’t have a marketing department telling me how to do things. All my paperbacks will match so that when the reader gets a new book and finishes reading it, it will look awesome next to the other books in the saga he’s already purchased.
Anyway, here’s the latest thumbnail of the redesign. We changed the layout of the starfighters to account for using all the front cover instead of just a narrow rectangle that we had with the marble top and bottom. So the fighters had to be moved into a new position. Then we had to figure out how to word the title for Book 2. I think we’ll just be simple and direct with that. We still have the Star Saga banner at the top for continuity. You know right away that you are in the first trilogy of the saga by the blue color, same as Book 1. The fonts will all be better executed in the final version, but this gives us an idea of where we want to go. Compare the current version with the original pencil sketch I did months ago.
The models were scratch built by myself and photographed for this cover by Byron. He’ll be adding more Visual Effects to them including engine glow, explody stuff and motion blur. We were trying to emulate the model kit box art of our youth. I think we have achieved that. When the final design is ready, I think we’ll have an eye catching SF book cover that any interested reader will want to check out.
Work has already commenced on some of the models we’ll use for the Book 3 cover next year. If you want to check out posts related to building these models, you can click on the Model Builds link in the main menu of this website.
I like it, Ken. Well done.