Last year, I put my toe in eBook original publishing’s treacherous
waters.
I started out with my own, already-published novels for
which I had retained electronic rights—
HEAD GAMES and
TOROS & TORSOS. That
went pretty well, so I started thinking about moving on to some original stuff.
This wasn’t a hard decision: In a print market dedicated to
a one-book-a-year publishing concept, I knew a lot of stuff I’ve written was never going to see publication anytime
soon, or maybe not ever.
It’s been a heady experience so far, and one that allows the
former art student in me to at last get some visual artistic urges out of my
system via cover design.
Before putting my own eBook originals out there, I spent a
lot of time looking at how others packaged their stuff.
The thing that struck
me most is the terrible execution of the cover art for the bulk of eBook originals.
Fact is, as readers/consumers we do judge books by their covers.
Many a great tale has been commercially wrecked by a lousy
cover.
Conversely, more than one mediocre book has seen its sales driven by a
great piece of packaging.
***
I’ve always been a prolific writer and I was at this trade a
long time before securing publication. Consequently, I have a lot of manuscripts in the hopper.
Looking over my unpublished backlist, I made the decision to
first publish a long-languishing series of novels I wrote about a writer. Most
of the books were written in the 1990s, and the series came close to earning me
publication back around 1991 or ’92.
The author in those books was a guy named
Chris Lyon. The
novels turned largely on historic, unsolved crimes. They were, at base,
literary thrillers.
In 2007, my debut novel, HEAD GAMES, was published. It was a
literary thriller about an author named Hector Lassiter who pokes around famous
historic, unsolved crimes and brushes shoulders with historic figures in the
process. The Lassiter series clearly owed a lot to my experience writing the
Lyon novels.
In the course of writing the Lassiter cycle, I sometimes
picked up characters from the Lyon series (Lassiter sidekicks Bud Fiske and
James Hanrahan, for instance, got their first work outs/mentions in long-ago
written Lyon books).
Pretty quickly, the timelines, events and even some
storylines from the unpublished Lyon series and the emerging Lassiter series
got tangled up with one another.
The two series seemed bent upon speaking to and expanding
upon one another. At some point, Chris Lyon insinuated himself into
PRINT THE LEGEND.
Hector, particularly, began to push himself into Lyon’s
unpublished saga in a big way.
As a result of that mingling, last year, I took the time and
actually wrote a new novel uniting the two series after making the decision to launch
the Chris Lyon thrillers myself as eBook originals. (More on that in a minute.)
***
For better or worse, with the notable exception of
ROGUE MALES, I’ve always been pretty hands-on in terms of cover design and packaging concepts
for my published books.
For good reason, most authors are not allowed anywhere
near the design end of things. Somehow, that rule hasn’t applied to me.
HEAD GAMES’ cover was strongly modeled on concepts I put
forth to Bleak House after seeing some first passes by designers that frankly left
me cold.
For the Bleak House edition of TOROS & TORSOS, I
negotiated my own contract with the estate of Diego Rivera for the painting that
stands as that book’s cover.
PRINT THE LEGEND’s cover was drawn from a handful of
suggested cover photos of Hemingway I provided St. Martin’s at my then-editor’s
request.
EL GAVILAN’s cover, again, was drawn from an image I
suggested of razor baling wire.
When it came time to design the covers for my own eBooks, I was
thrilled by the prospect to have more cover control than ever before.
And I
knew exactly this much: I wanted the Chris Lyon covers to be clearly linked
visually, and to have a very bold, straight-forward branding concept that stood
out from the pack.
Looking over the genre series covers that most resonated for
me over the years, I turned immediately to two popular series.
The first was the Bantam Doc Savage pulp novel reprints of
the early 1960s. These were executed by the brilliant, realist painter
James Bama.
Bama chose an unusual monochromatic approach in painting his
best and most iconic Doc Savage covers.
I decided the Lyon covers would also
follow a monochromatic approach to immediately link them in the reader’s mind
and eye.
The other works I seized on were the hardcover James Bond
illustrations, particularly the British first edition covers painted by
Richard Chopping (working with significant input from author Ian Fleming).
The Chopping
covers tended to feel of-a-piece, and they rely on a single, in-your-face image
drawn directly from each novel.
In my mind, I saw some blending of the Bama/Chopping covers:
strong image and one hue.
To execute these hypothetical covers, I approached the
brilliant JT Lindroos, who designed the cover for my first published book,
2006’s collection of author interviews,
ART IN THE BLOOD.
In discussing cover ideas with JT years ago, I suggested
an image for ART IN THE BLOOD of a blood-splashed typewriter. JT took that
shorthand suggestion and expanded upon it to brilliant and striking effect.
I followed a similar, minimalist design suggestion approach
with JT for the Lyon covers.
I provided him with samples of some key Bama and
Chopping Doc Savage and Bond covers (reprinted here), the overarching concept I
saw for combining their styles, then the Lyon book titles and a couple of
suggested images for each novel.
JT ran with all that, in nearly every case providing the
perfect cover for each title on his very first pass—covers that seemed drawn directly
from my mind’s eye.
CABAL, the third Lyon novel, made its Kindle-exclusive
appearance this week. It shifts back and forth in time, from the 1990s, to the
1880s and Victorian London. The Whitechapel murders attributed to Jack the
Ripper are key to the plot, and Mr. Lindroos’ bloody red cover conveys that fact
in simple and evocative fashion, I think.
At this writing, I’m finalizing plans for Chris Lyon number four,
which will bring Chris Lyon and Hector Lassiter together on the page in a very
big way.
The novel is a kind of Rosetta stone for my fictional universe,
underscoring the overarching themes of both the Lyon and Lassiter series, and
setting up a new crime-solving author who could conceivably be passed the torch
by Hector and Chris somewhere down the line.
This new eBook original also
directly links back to my second Lassiter novel, TOROS & TORSOS.
The new book
will appear in April, exclusively for Kindle, and is entitled “ANGELS OF
DARKNESS,” a title that is a nod to Arthur Conan Doyle, who also suggested the
title for ART IN THE BLOOD.
Mr. Lindroos got my suggestions for Angels’ cover last night.
It’s
pretty simple imagery I suggested for this one: Something golden or bronze…
Something with forbidding looking angels or images evoking menace and Scotland,
the setting for much of the novel’s early action.
A bit ago, I got his first pass at an ANGELS cover. Two concepts; the second one, a very striking and unusual take, was perfect.
I'll share that image soon for book #4. In the meantime, if you're looking for a brilliant cover artist, check out Mr. Lindroos other work
here.
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