Category Archives: Book Covers

PaPa and Christian book cover process

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Last week, I wrote about my new book PaPa and Christian’s Great Adventures: The Treasure Awaits! And I thought it would be interesting to show off the cover design process. After I had finished up most of the interior art, I talked with the author, Patrick Carberry, about the cover. He had a few ideas, including somehow incorporating this page from the interior:

I took his ideas and, combining them with a few of my own, worked up 4 rough cover designs.

Patrick really liked cover 4, using a variation of the interior art, but preferred the title treatment from cover 2. And so, here’s the final cover:

You can buy the book on Amazon at this link:

A Completely Fictional Book Cover

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I love designing book covers. I had idea the other day that I thought would make a striking cover for a mid-grade novel. But it was for a book that doesn’t exist. But I didn’t want to let that stop me.  So here is my book cover for the completely fictional “Russell T. Jones on the Edge of Forever”

You can see my process of creating the cover over at Behance.

Designing book cover for Just Let ‘Em Play

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Yesterday, the Kansas City Star had an article about the book Just Let ‘Em Play, which I had the pleasure of designing the book cover for. It’s a really good article but, sadly, my cover didn’t make it into the print edition of the paper (it is in the online version, thankfully.)

I thought it might be interesting to show off my process and how I designed the book cover. I’ve done quite a bit of book cover design but don’t mention it near enough here.

I was given the project before the manuscript was complete and going by the working title of  Let ‘Em Play.  I discussed the book with the publisher, Ascend Books, and got a handle on what they wanted to the cover to accomplish. The book is about a philosophy for youth sports (covering all sports and ages) with an emphasis on having fun rather than winning at all costs. With that in mind, I worked up a few cover mock-ups. I usually do 3 or 4 cover mockups at a time for the publisher to choose from. This particular cover was unusual in that none of my initial drafts were quite right and I went back to the drawing board a few times. Here’s a look at some of the cover drafts and a little commentary on each one. (Please remember that these are unfinished mock-ups and there would certainly have been elements changed or adjusted had any of these covers been used. The photos are mostly unpurchased stock photos and some are watermarked by the owners)

 

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