A Journey of a Thousand Covers

So much is happening!

It’s been a whirlwind the past few months as we come closer to publishing. And we are close, like really close. My amazing team has put together some cool branding and a newsletter that I will be putting out regularly. The first one comes out Tuesday (check your junk mail just in case). It will reveal the new cover and our publishing date!

The book has gone though various cover designs in the last year. Even the series title has changed a few times. As I prepare for the cover reveal on Tuesday, I wanted to share about the process and some of the different iterations we went through to get there.

COVER #1 September 2022

When I finished the manuscript at the end of the summer, I wanted to get an idea of what the formatting would look like… and yeah, I wanted to hold a copy in my hands… so I grabbed this image from… somewhere. I really liked this concept of the silhouettes of the travelers looking out into the mysterious unknown. When I started writing, I called the book Tales of the Unicorn Sea which is the body of water the four continents of their world Eris exist on. But eventually The Great Awakening won out. Legend of the White Lion was the series title I was digging at the time. It was really cool to get a few copies of this, even though it was a very early version of the manuscript.

Cover #2 Febuary 2023

After an official edit, A friend of mine helped me imagine some of the characters and scenes through the wonderful world of AI. This cover is a scene where the travelers enter the mountains through the Pegasus gate; two giant Pegasus carved into the sides of the mountains. Again it was cool to have another copy of the book in my hands, this time a more polished version and much closer to what you will read today.

Cover #3 March 2023

I decided to change the series title to Legends of the Last Crown for a minute. It sounded cooler to me… and honestly I wanted to distance myself a bit from the Narnia series since Aslan is a lion, and our central figure in the series is called the “White Lion Prince” (though he is not a lion). I decided to take a gamble on the site Fiverr for a cover design, which is a great site to contract all kinds of work. Many people have had success getting great work for a reasonable price. I did not. The artist was very kind… but I think I gave him too big of a task. This was not a good cover. It did however, provide us with a good laugh.

Cover #4 March 2023

Since I had contracted the Fiverr dude, I asked for a total revision of the cover, which he graciously did for me. I set the bar much lower and just said “Give me a cool sword.” The sword was cool… but i knew that this road was not leading where I wanted it to go. Thank you Fiverr guy.

Cover #5 April 2023

Then I thought… I can make a better cover myself. Taking advantage of the AI machine once again I designed a much more appropriate cool sword.

You can see I attempted a pen name too. No one calls me J.D. Well just a few people randomly. But I thought it sounded like a better author name. At this point Erica provided some timely wisdom… “This cover is cool, but it’s too dark for your audience.” Which I agreed with. Back to the drawing board.

So here we sat. A finished book with no cover.

There was a publisher I reached out a few months earlier in hopes of publishing with that, like many others, said no. One of the reasons I was drawn to them was I loved their cover designs. After some research, I found one of their designers named Emilie. On her website she said that she was booked out four or five months. I figured I’d take a gamble and reached out to her, gave her my pitch, and pretty much begged her to fit me in. She wrote back immediately and squeezed me into her schedule. In June we went back and forth. I had so many ideas… two different author names… three different series titles. She was so great to work with and had patience with my pickiness.

The final cover, title, (and author name) is just right. I’m very excited to share it all with you.

The newsletter comes out Tuesday! If you’d like to receive it let me know at Jim@JimDCreative.com