Cover and Art for A Question of Allegiance

The editor has yet to return my manuscript (it’s not due back for another week or three). In the meantime, it’s back to figuring out how to create the cover for A Question of Allegiance (AQoA for short).

I messed up. When creating the cover for A Day at the Zoo, I envisioned something with elements of the novel itself. What I came up with was, in my very humble opinion, great. But great as a cover for the entire series, not for a single novel. Check out the rejected versions here. So what to do with AQoA? Change the color? Add images that weren’t in the original?

When creating covers for a series, there needs to be a tie-in for the books, so on the (nowadays virtual) shelf there’s a sense of cohesion. To generate a reader’s thought along the lines of, “Oh, right, I read that book. These others must be from the same series.”

Some covers use the same fonts and titling for the author name, like S.A. Corey’s Expanse Series:

Click to see in Barnes & Noble

Other series covers keep the layout consistent, even if fonts and backgrounds change:

Click to see in Barnes & Noble

These folks have great cover designers, and access to cool original art. For example, the Mercy Thompson series:

I’m total fanboy of her books. Click to check in out in B&N’s site.

That last one is interesting. The font, after book #3, changes, and the layout for books four and up in the series all use the same font and layout. I can’t say I’ll have access to the amazing artists who painted the pictures used in the book covers, but the artist who put the cover (and book design) together for me did a smash-up job, so I Will Have Faith.

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