Book Cover Illustrations

Sometimes if you look at the numbers, the prospects for making money in any given business may seem bleak. And yet… Even in the poorest of industries, there are often people making money hand-over-fist while everyone is claiming such things are impossible. Certainly this is the case today with the publishing industry. When you look […]

This week we finished the cover for best-selling author John Phillip Backus’ The Sisterhood: After the Fall, Book Three. The novel is a post-apocalyptic science fiction series. For our starting point with this book cover illustration, John selected one of the digital paintings in my online gallery “Virtual Friends.” . As the project progressed, much […]

I recently completed the cover artwork for Anthony DeCosmo’s action-adventure/techno-thriller The God Particle which is the first in his “Opposing Force” series. The key requirement for the cover was that the environment look like a new lab with a biological containment door. After doing a little research on what a bio-containment door should look like […]

Here’s the cover illustration I created for James Diffin’s new science fiction/fantasy/action-adventure novel The Silent Call. The author wanted to picture a pivotal scene in the novel where the hero (John Ryder, a young American chess grand master) discovers there may be a modern-day Merlin in his life, with the magician taking the hero to […]

Sometimes I discover a variety of tidbits that aren’t quite enough for a blog entry, but which I suspect will be of interest to those connected to the publishing industry. So… Authors can now autograph their Kindlel ebooks for fans — via KindleGraph. Authors may sign onto the service via Twitter accounts or set up […]

I was recently contacted by Spanish author Richard Falken about creating a pair of covers for his upcoming adventure series. The writer had a limited budget for his covers and was wondering if I’d consider creating a single illustration and then letting him use it for the first two books in the series, perhaps with […]

I’m often asked how I create my book cover artwork and magazine illustrations. So I decided to write a little about that in this post (and also to create a reference page for folks asking this question in the future). First off, while I try to achieve a traditional, painterly look with much of my […]

Here’s the cover illustration I created for Christina J. Adams’ new science fiction novel The White Lilac. The trick was to create a cover illustration that the viewer would perceive as a young woman in water — rather than a gal floating in the air or space. To achieve this, I worked with a variety […]

Here’s a novel written for those wanting to know what it’s like to have a sociopath in your love life. Yes, I did the cover illustration. Perhaps the book’s author knew about my sociopathic tendencies. A Life Lived Ridiculously can be purchased from the author’s website www.ridiculouslife.net, or through Amazon or through Barnes & Noble. […]

As noted in a previous post, the average book printed by a large publisher averages about 40 percent returns from book stores and other sellers in the USA. In other words, for every 100 books printed by a big press, on an average only 60 are sold. What happens to the other 40 percent? Oddly […]