Caravan of Fire cover reveal - The journey continues
I know, I know, I promised more fairies but… but… It’s here!
Our newletter subscribers already saw the cover and the blurb of Caravan of Fire, the second book in the Spirits of Seiran series. If you want to get the freshest news before anyone else, make sure to check out the subscription formula on the left 😉 We send a newsletter every month with the latest news about our WIPs, what happened on the blog, and some group promotions where you can get a lot of free short stories, excerpts and more. Yes, this was an advertisement.
With our second book, creating the cover wasn’t as big of a journey, as it was with Shackles of the Storm. If you’re interested in the complete story about us creating the design theme, you can read about it here.
We saw a video somewhere, made by a really successful author about how she sold a lot of books. One tip was keeping the cover similar in a series, so people might recognize that as a brand. It was one of those advice that aren’t completely useless, and also logical if you think about it, so we followed it. We kept the black background along with the circle in the middle, but this time wanted the fractal art behind to be red. Because you know… fire. This color-play is something we’re definitely keeping for the whole series, the third entry will most likely be blue, the fourth shall be green, and if there should be a fifth one–and we’re slowly realizing we need five books to tell the story we want–that will be purple, like a bibliophile’s infinity stones. I also wanted to have a touch of blue in the red, because of plot reasons, and also because blue fire is cool, but Dar said that it doesn’t look good, so it didn’t make it into the final version.
So a few month ago, Dar came up with this:
We really liked it, but there were a few problems, like the silhouette of the tents weren’t royalty free, and the whole picture is too small. If you’ve never made a cover yet we can tell you, every retailer needs a huge picture. I understand, we all want it to look good in print, but it made our work much harder. The fractal we chose for this was too small, and when we did a foolish attempt to enlarge it, it ruined the quality. Also, we couldn’t find the same horse silhouette with the girl on it again, so Dar needed to create the whole middle-part all over again. As much as we wanted to recreate this picture, we couldn’t. I found a new fractal art, this time with the right resolution.
The next was the silhouette. Dar wanted flames on it, and we also wanted to keep the tents, so we looked for different vector based pictures of them too. We also needed to find a new „girl on a horse” art, I still don’t know why we couldn’t find the one we used on the first cover, but then Dar showed me this one. Not a girl, but a couple and it also resonated with the plot so I love it even more! Then Dar added the sun motive, and after a few hours of playing with the shapes like children, he made our next cover!
I hope you like it as much as I do – and I LOVE IT. It was definitely worth the heartbreak of GIMP suddenly freezing without saving anything, forcing us to start once again :’) But freakin’ look at it!
As a bonus, I've just realized you haven't even seen the blurb, so here it is:
Grief is like a desert mirage. It paints the world differently, luring even the best towards danger. Zaira wanted nothing other than to leave everything behind, hiding among the wandering caravan-city of An Ramash. Struggling with her pain of loss and blossoming djinn powers under the tutelage of the fabled Nazrik, her new life comes to a sudden change with the arrival of yet another djinn. Harboring this new fugitive brings them face-to-face against enemies both old and new. Hain, Ezair's childhood friend is only one of the many dangers hunting them, and all pale compared to the leader of the fanatical Court of Fire. |
Cheers,
Lory
Comments
Post a Comment