Wow, the release date for Invictus: Captive is coming up super fast now! Luckily I am loading the final-final-final version of the ebook and paper edition today, whew! There will be time for one more proofing run, but I don’t plan to obsess about whether this particular comma should be removed or that particular line should be in its own paragraph or whatever. I think it’s good to go.
Now, I’ve got this neat video clip about the cover art for this book.
When I first started thinking about the covers, I said to myself,
–Must look different from No Foreign Sky, and I mean totally different.
–Must scream “This is SF.”
–You know, a spaceship would be ideal.
Spaceship covers are a dime a dozen, so I spent a few hours of my life looking at premade SF spaceship-type covers. However, I could not find anything I liked. Everything had a planet in the foreground, or human figures that didn’t look right, or something else I didn’t want. I also didn’t want to spend more time looking. So eventually I just ordered custom covers instead. Once I made that decision, there didn’t seem much reason to delay, so these covers were ready long (long) before the release dates for the duology. It’s certainly good to have the covers ready and waiting, I have to say. You may have noticed that I ordered the covers for next couple Tuyo-world books before I started writing them. I’ll probably do that much more often from now on, because (I have discovered) I just hate waiting for covers to be ready.
In this case, the cover artist — this is the same person who did the cover for No Foreign Sky, incidentally, but this one was digital and that one was illustration. Anyway, he put together a video showing the creation process for the first of these covers. It’s so interesting to watch the process, so here you go:
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Well, that’s cool! I see all those resources all that layering for the explosion was pretty neat, among other details.
I wonder if they would link to the book’s Amazon page if you asked? It seems like a great marketing opportunity. Just saying.
Haven’t watched the video yet, but I wanted to say I really like all three of the covers this artist did for you!
The cover for No Foreign Sky is so different that it’s hard to imagine anyone getting it confused with Invictus, and the Invictus covers obviously go together but are distinct enough that it will be easy for me to remember which one is the pinkish one and which is the teal one. All three of them are easy to read visually at a very small scale (important for people like me who do a lot of their book buying and reading on their phones). Also, obviously I haven’t read Invictus yet, but I think the No Foreign Sky cover has a really good balance between modern and more retro (…for lack of a better word) SF cover design – the art style itself says “recently published SF book that draws on all the best things from 80s/90s space adventure SF,” which I think is pretty much the sales pitch you want that cover to be making.