Book Cover Illustrations

David Kempf’s science fiction thriller Travel Bug is available this weekend in the Kindle format for free. It’s a good read and you can get a copy from Amazon.com. Here’s the synopsis for the book: “A prestigious family is hiding a dangerous secret. It’s deep within the walls of their grand estate. But no secret […]

Sometimes an artist is called upon to create a monster, demon, fairys, gnome, troll or alien beast. And that’s always a challenge because the public has been “educated” by movies and artwork to expect a certain “look” from many of these creatures; meanwhile the client hiring the artist to create a picture for a book […]

When writing my previous post about Dieselpunk artwork, I forgot the artwork I did about a year ago for Stephen Quayle’s Empire Beneath the Ice. These illustrations arguably fall into the Dieselpunk spectrum (in this case, uniting Nazi weapons, uniforms, and such with the German work on perfecting flying saucers at the end of World […]

For many years, magazines and books used black and white or grayscale illustrations in their text. This cut the printing costs since only one ink was being used, while still supplying some visual interest, as well as capturing buyers who leafed through the publication at a newsstand. Over the years, these illustrations pretty much vanished […]

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks creating new cover illustrations for some of John Bowers’ science fiction “Starport” series. Above is the final illustration and layout of the updated cover for Occupy Eroak. As is often the case, I created several several versions of the illustration before we finally got to something that worked well. Perhaps […]

Everyone understands that a quality book cover is the new gatekeeper that helps would-be buyers decide whether or not a book is worth spending money on. Put a poor cover illustration on your book and sales will be poor. But what happens if you’re on a very limited budget and can’t afford to hire an […]

I recently completed the cover and inner illustrations for my novel Lesser Gods (which is a free download from Jan. 23-26, 2013 along with software/apps to read it on about any computer, tablet, or smartphone made — as well as a Kindle at Amazon.com). I’ve been writing, revising, and reworking this science fiction novel on […]

Author Mary Maddox recently wrote of her experience in choosing an effective cover for her novel Talion. Originally she’d selected a very attractive, abstract photo for the cover — yet it failed to sell the book. At a book signing, one blunt person who told her, “I’m not buying your book because I don’t like […]

Today’s project was finalizing the artwork for John Chadwell’s Hunt of the Sea Wolves which will go into print first as a Kindle title and from there… Well, the sky’s the limit because Diverse Talent Group is currently soliciting producers. John Chadwell has written hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers, is a successful script […]

One of last week’s projects consisted of a re-working of the cover of Lawrence P. White’s novel. The new book is actually two books combined into one, giving readers a two-fer when they buy it. The original title (now the first half of the new book) was Spirit of Empire. That became the subtitle with […]