Covering the East Witch

Art is easy. Design is hard. In a book cover, I have to capture the entire thing - and that's not a picture is worth a thousand words. It's more like the picture is a hundred thousand words. Oddly enough, it's easier to do client covers. I can detach, step back, pull up comps of genre covers to look at, and do the thing. My own books? Argh, Ugh, Ow. Pulling away far enough to do it right is downright difficult.

This book has been hard, since the beginning. It took me three years to write it all the way down. It took me almost six months to force myself to do the first revision passes so it could go to the editor. And the cover! Well, I've showed you all my attempts in the past. But I'm coming to the point where I have to pick one and stick with it.

One of (many) problems I've had is trying to find cover comps for this book. It's not a clean genre. Yes, it's fantasy. That's, um, broad. To understate the matter considerably. It is not, in any way, urban fantasy, although one of the main characters is a contemporary human. Who runs screaming out of cities. Heh, typical heroine for me, I know. The setting is high fantasy, the plot is not. The plot is action adventure. So... action adventure fantasy? That is a thing. Problem is, there's a lot of fairy tale in this book. Like a lot, one of my beta readers pointed out that it has David Drake level research behind it. Which is true, in a way. I spent part of those three years doing the research to lay the groundwork under stuff I already knew about Russian fairy tales, and then adding in Siberian folk tales. Which are, shall I say, scanty. Oh, and don't forget the Alaskan lore I brought Underhill with Anna, the main female character. She approaches the whole thing through a lens of 'how did children's stories go? Not the disneyfied ones, the ones that end badly for those who forget their manners...' 

All this, and I have to create a singular piece of art, with room for text, to capture and convey it to the reader. I've been pulling my hair out. 

So why doesn't Ivan make the cover? Poor Ivan.

This still might not be the final iteration. But it's very close.

I kind of gave up on this one while I was working on it, which you may be able to tell.

I like the art. It's very literary, which does not suit the book at all. I may throw it on the back cover of the print edition, though.