Blood River, my first Nightmare Vacations story, has a new cover to celebrate its second birthday and the imminent arrival of its sibling: Blood Point.
With this new cover, Blood River is available in hardcover for the first time and includes a preview of my new story. Although Blood Point is not a sequel, both novels exist in the same universe of supernatural horror.
I created the original cover for Blood River, but it was always my ambition to use a professional designer. A good cover can lift your novel out of the sea of titles online or in a bookshop, helping readers to make that split-second choice to read your cover blurb or a sample.
I’ve worked with magazine and web designers in the past, but this is my first time working with a book cover designer. I invited Andrew Brown of British agency Design for Writers to take on both Blood River and Blood Point, creating a unified style for the series.
It’s a specialist field, requiring a knowledge of the design, images and typography that tell your readers about the genre, tone and style of story they’ll find between the covers. For print, that extends to the back cover, where your blurb and other information must be easy to read, and the spine — sometimes be your book’s only presence on a crowded bookshelf.

Design vs illustration
Then I did what I always do on a new project: work out what I want and start a spreadsheet to compare different services. The first decision: design or illustration?
Illustrators create a piece of original artwork for your cover but it’s only part of the journey. Once you’ve got that image, you still need a designer to arrange your titles. Some illustrators are also designers, but they’re more often separate people doing specialist jobs, and my budget wouldn’t cover that.
Designers take existing elements like stock photography or illustrations, and use tools like Photoshop to combine and enhance them until the original elements are unrecognisable. They’ll select fonts and arrange your titles, matching them with the artwork into a single composition. Most book covers today are composite designs because it’s a lot more affordable. My brief also included a flattened Photoshop file with a text layer so that I can adjust the back cover text.

The book cover briefing
I shortlisted designers through the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and writing.ie, who both list approved publishing professionals. Design for Writers won out for their sample covers, packages and clear responses to my questions.
The process began with a design briefing for each book, plus additional questions about the series. The process made me interrogate my story all over again from a new perspective.
The briefing covers the genre, keywords, setting, themes, tone, main characters, style and an overview of the story. It goes on to your target audience and how you want your readers to feel as they read the book, which may be a question that you’ve never explicitly asked yourself.
Then you get into the details of scenes that might stand out on the cover: moments that might already exist in your mind’s eye and convey something essential about your story.
I had to revisit the dreaded comparison titles — books that you expect to see listed under “People who read this also read…”. This time, though, I had to think about designs that were visually successful. Amazon’s bestseller lists for each genre are a great resource for this, as are sites like The Book Designer.
Finally, there’s the AI question. Are you willing to use AI-generated art? If so, how much can you accept? Even if you don’t employ it in the final product, generative AI can help to rapidly iterate ideas. Used well, AI-generated art should be as invisible as any other special effect; used badly, it’s all extra fingers and weird eyes. For this cover, we didn’t use any AI because stock images provided everything we required.

From cover briefing to concept
Andrew Brown, my designer at Design for Writers, explains how he used the briefing to create the two concepts that are part of their package:
“For Blood River, we knew that Alex wanted a very clear horror feel, along with some specific notes on the setting and some ideas he’d had. We focused a lot on the jungle river setting, and while it’s not always possible to get very specific details on individual characters without expensive custom illustration or photography, we looked closely at options to represent the main characters in the book.
“The fonts were particularly fun to work on, as horror has a strong, recognisable feel and we really wanted to evoke that through the typography to go along with the blood red of the river.”
Choosing a book cover concept
The first concept captured the Borneo river setting with a woman alone in a boat, but despite the generous blood mist, it felt too whimsical and light for a violent tale of survival.
The second concept leaped out. The typography alone demonstrates how a great choice of font and colour can bring drama to a book cover, making the title, hook and my name stand out in even a thumbnail view.
The overhead view of two people on a boat, in a literal river of blood, reminded me of the classic riverine horror story, Deliverance.
Immediately, I saw Tara and Holly desperately fleeing the violence of the camp, and the layering of text and image brought depth to the art. Andrew had found a scene which is relatively low on action but captures the sense of being stranded and under threat, far from home.
There was some way to go, but I had my new cover. And yes, the real Blood River in Borneo — the Sungai Darah — it’s that colour.

From concept to final cover
The first task was to find a boat like the traditional canoes used on rivers in Borneo. Stock photo libraries had plenty to choose from! I suggested adding a crocodile to the river, but it didn’t add anything and there was a risk of misleading readers by suggesting that this was a monster story.
DfW’s Andrew adds: “There was a very clear, strong winner from our initial concepts, and we had some engaging and dynamic back-and-forth until we got it just right.
“We added a few more details to vividly foreground that jungle setting, which we loved being able to wrap around onto the back cover to give the whole book a unified, strong and memorable design.”
The final package includes 3D mock-ups for marketing graphics and a Photoshop version of the cover wrap, with a free text layer so that I can fine-tune the back cover blurb.

The process took about two weeks, although we could have pushed it faster. Andrew was helpful and patient with someone who hadn’t been through the process before.
And now, the new look Blood River has been released into the wild for the ultimate test: will it attract more readers?
What do you think of the new cover for Blood River? What are your favourite book covers and what experiences have you had with your own cover designs?
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