Cover Tease

 

Talk about putting the horse before the cart. Well, I have, after spending several hours this past week working on the cover for my next novel, even though I am just over halfway through writing the first draft of it. I still have months of work ahead before I would ever need any sort of cover. At best. And since I am planning to shop this story around to agents and traditional publishers, the published version of the story will no doubt have a professionally designed cover, assuming I'm successful. (“That’s a joke, son.”) Still, I was thinking about  how I wanted to approach this cover, and came up with some ideas that I simply could not wait to try and see what it would look like.

I do all my own covers, not because I’m good at it, but because I’m cheap. And when you don’t usually charge for your books, cheap is good. Besides, a professionally made cover in the mainstream style isn’t going to change the contents of the book, and so, would probably be misleading, since I don’t write mainstream types of stories.

As I see it, there are several approaches you can take for your covers. You can illustrate an important scene from the story. Or you can back off a bit, and illustrate a non-specific scene to create either a sense of the story, or suggest its mood. Or you can simply toss the story aside and do a cover that you think will sell the book, either with a fictional scene of the fictional story, or using some eye catching graphic design. Being a mostly impressionist painter, I generally  have striven to create a cover that suggests the mood of the story with a scene as close to an actual scene in the book as I can, that being the limit of my talent.

This time around, I decided to avoid painting a cover altogether – as that has gotten to be quite a chore for me these days – and instead make a cover that gives a sense of the book by using a sort of collage effect on the cover. More  of a graphic approach to the cover this time around. This effort involved using a 1913 copy of A Satchel Guide For the Vacation Tourist in Europe, (with its red cover changed to blue) from my bookshelves, along with its included rail map of Central Europe, a photo of a ship's anti-aircraft gun that I took when, at the age of 9, I got to go aboard a cruiser off the coast of Milwaukee as part of some sort of naval showcase event, a photo of my late father-in-law at the age of 31, along with a detail from a photo I found of a family photo of a Russian aristocratic family in the 19^th century that I came across in researching my story. I then used these in creating several items for the collage in Gimp – ID cards and a newspaper clipping. The result is below.

Of course everything about this cover is tentative, including the name of the novel. Basically it is a proof of concept. All the items in the composition are on separate layers so that they can be shifted around as I please at a later date. But in any event, now you know what the story is all about, right?