I am a creative person. I’ve always had creative impulses, and I continually tinker with my creations (You may not have noticed every change to my site, but I do minor tweaks to it every week, and major thematic redesigns every 18-24 months. The current design is just over 12 months old).

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ve been creating, modifying, and playing with digital imagery since before Photoshop was born (starting with Aldus Pagemaker and Freehand, then Adobe Illustrator and LetraSet’s LetraStudio. Eventually I moved on to Corel Painter and Photoshop).

But I’m not a visual artist.

I can manipulate existing work but generating art, objects, etc from scratch is not my strength and my output tends to be crap (and I won’t use AI). So I tend to work from either stock photography or photos from my own extensive, mostly unpublished catalogue (I’ve lived on three continents and travelled extensively on those and two more. I have thousands of photos ranging in quality from ‘WTF is that?’ to ‘Aw, beauty!”).

Creatives I respect always talk about A/B testing in design, but I’ve yet to have the budget or audience to try that. So I put a cover out there, and I wait. If it gets attention, I keep it. Otherwise, I iterate.

Here’s a few examples I’m going to go through

Space Opera

This one was originally inspired by the Hugo Award rocket. I drew the right side, got it looking good, then duplicated, flipped and merged to make the complete rocket, which i loving ly call “Hugo”. As I started releasing other collections, and branding became a concern, I moved from red to gold text, and less text on the cover. Hugo got a dark makeover with some textures and lighting. Also, I’d made a background from an old star map and some specks floating in water. Various gradients and lens flare experiments had lead to a background that I was replicating on all my space opera stories. in the most recent iteration, only the background is still present. Hugo got repurposed for another cover. But i might actually revert to the second cover here and there.

Read on!

Sylvester, Down

Long ago, I’d made this wedge-shaped ship and put it on fire. It’s appeared in many places, but mainly in the first two iterations of Sylvester Down (and now in Zeus, Beheld.) That last version of the cover is Hugo, overlaid on himself and warped to make it look like there’s a yacht-shaped ship being fired upon. This is the other one that I might revert to the second cover instead.

The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir

So it needs to be said that the titular ship, Novyy Mir, is the rechristened International Space Station. So, yes that is the ISS on the cover, and yes, it makes sense once you know the context. Also in both iterations, that is the moon. The more recent version has more movement, due to layered blurs and has acquired my (patented?) star field with added lens flare (I feel like JJ Abrams!) but without the overlaid star map. I’ve also purchased a decent font.

Tau Ceti

This book started, in the early 1990s, as The Key to Alexandria. Then became Tau Ceti 12 (I didn’t even remember this, but I have found notes claiming the title change in 2014). Sometime in 2014, it became just Tau Ceti. That’s what i called it wen i made a special edition for my mother, and gave it to her in 2015. I started making covers for it, not for public consumption but to incentivize me into finishing the book (11 years ago, so I guess it didn’t work too well.).

Here is the evolution of that cover, starting with someone else’s are, then, as i got to thinking more about actually publishing it, working up my own cover ideas.

Once I started doing my own covers, it too included the little wedge spaceship. The first two covers, based on the art work of an artist on Deviant Art, were moody and atmospheric. While I liked that aesthetic, it didn’t capture the energy i wanted the cover to project. Neither did my own attempts until i started working on the idea of using clipping paths and text to hide/reveal parts of an image. And eventually we ended up with the cover on the right, the one I’ve designed to use for at least the first edition.

One last note:

Here’s Zeus Beheld, to show you my burning wedge-ship. Enjoy