Book Cover Illustrations

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 […]

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 […]

There was a time when I drew my black and white artwork with pen and ink, working over pencil sketches that then were erased after the ink had dried. It was intensive, back-breaking work that often took all day just to produce two or three drawings. And in my youth I played with oil paints […]

The last few weeks I’ve been struggling with a book layout project that’s proved to be a lot of fun. The publisher has given me pretty much free rein: I’ve been free to choose/create a typeface family, devise the two-column layout, and pick the photos and illustrations to go into it. In short, it’s been […]

I had the opportunity to have some of my artwork showcased in the upcoming May issue of Horror Bound Magazine. While searching for suitable illustrations for the magazine, I discovered a few “Golden Oldies” that I thought I’d post over the next few days. Most of these (including this one) have never been used as […]

I’ve been using TinEye the last few days to discover folks using my artwork online without permission. This is a handy little search engine that compares similarities between pictures. If I find sites using my work without permission, I then write a take-down notice, ask the user to credit me for the artwork, or whatever […]

Yet another book illustration from my newly illustrated version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death — which can be downloaded for free from Datafilehost (in PDF format). I’ve also created the book illustrations for two other free ebooks: Poe’s “Eleonora” and “The Raven.” Feel free to share all three books with your […]