Blood Point is on the way to the printers, so it’s time to reveal how that dramatic cover emerged from my story of an Irish Nightmare Vacation. And what’s going on with that pine cone?
Spoiler alert: gibbets and pine cones? Hmmm… You’ll have to read the full story to find out, but there are some clues in the extracts I sent to my newsletter subscribers last year when this was still a work in progress.
You can catch up with those lucky folk at the Blood Point home page. I publish a new piece of short fiction every month, so subscribe today if you don’t want to miss out.
Thinking about covers is a harsh gear change for many authors. You’ve spent months or years thinking about this complex narrative with all of its twists and turns; now you’ve got to boil it all down to a single arresting visual.
A good cover will make a potential reader choose your story instead of all the other options, just so that they’ll read the blurb and come a step closer to buying your book. It’s a split second decision that won’t win you a reader, but it can lose them.
Blood Point’s cover influencers
Just like Blood River, the cover journey began with a briefing document for Andrew at Design for Writers. This asked for details of the target audience, my story, the characters, locations, items and key scenes that might yield strong visuals. The brief also asked for market references: other covers I’d like to see Blood Point sat beside on real and virtual bookshelves. I also chose a few covers that didn’t work for me.
I began with a series of bestselling covers from Amazon, stories with a folk-horror feel, or horror that simply punched out from the screen. Max Brooks, Adam Nevill and Scott Smith feature strongly here, but the funny thing is that these authors have had multiple covers for their works. Different covers for the same stories feature in both my positive and negative influences.
Traditionally published authors often have very little influence over their book cover artwork. I suspect that some of these editions have been designed to target demographics that wouldn’t pick up a horror novel. They’re far from being bad covers, but I aimed for an audience that wants to read a horror story.
I had a few other red lines. Blood Point features fairies, but they’re as terrifying and inhuman as they are beautiful. I didn’t want any sexy urban fantasy fairies. Magical Irish landscape features like stone circles and fairy rings also feature, but I didn’t feel they’d give the right atmosphere.
When we’d settled on styles, Andrew and I discussed concepts that he could turn into an image, working through a series of proofs to the final cover. This time, we had a bit of head start, because Blood River had already provided a style for the titles.
The cage and the cone
Two strong ideas emerged. The first was a hanging gibbet cage that imprisons a key character. The second, a repeated motif of a pine cone used to magically silence a bewitched female.
As much as I liked it, the first idea but had two major drawbacks. An empty cage has no human connection, for a start. Good quality stock images of gibbets are also hard to find, and my budget covered a designer to combine existing photos. Original photo-quality art is illustrator territory, and it comes with a huge uplift in cost.
Fortunately, there are a lot more stock images of women and pine cones. We abandoned the gibbet and Andrew worked up a first proof of the pine cone concept, employing the magic of Photoshop to bring new life to old pictures. It was the right direction but way too sexy, and the red water behind made a connection to Blood River that doesn’t exist in the story.
Dank, dark and dramatic
The second proof brought us much closer, with young woman who looks like she’s having a terrible time, somewhere dank and dark and nasty. The zoom and tilt was dramatic, but I felt that we lost too much of her face to the titles. There was also nowhere for the subtitle to sit comfortably.
One feature of Blood River’s cover that I’d really liked was the depth achieved where objects sat over the titles. I wondered if some blood could drip from her face over my name. Mea culpa, this was a terrible idea, as the next iteration showed us.
All the same, we were flying along on the right track by now. This version was all about minor tweaks to her face and other elements. And so we arrived at the final cover: a WTF mystery that could be a heroine in danger or a villain getting her just desserts.
It was all down to me now. When my beta readers delivered their feedback, I’d produce the final draft. Finally, the job almost every self-published author hates: writing a blurb that will close the deal and sell your book.
What do you think? Is this an arresting cover that would make you stop and read the blurb, click through to the Amazon page or pick it up from a bookshelf? How does it make you feel?
Mentions