One’s Aspect to the Sun Cover Art

[sherrydramsey]

Originally published at Sherry D. Ramsey. You can comment here or there.

By now you might already have seen the wonderful cover art for my upcoming novel, One’s Aspect to the Sun. If not, just look to the right of this post. :) Oh, you want to see it even bigger? Click here.

The artist is the talented Ashley Walters, whose lovely portfolio you can find at her site, www.ashleywalters.net. I think she did a fabulous job!

What I really wanted to talk about, though, was the very enjoyable experience I had being involved in the creation of this cover. At the outset, Tyche sent me a very detailed questionnaire to complete, so that I could offer input on my vision of what the cover could/should look like. Of course, there were no guarantees that my vision would guide the creation of the cover. No publisher in his or her right mind would offer that–what if I wanted something totally crazy and inappropriate? But they asked, and it was nice to have the opportunity to think about it and share my thoughts. I knew I wanted a spacescape of some sort–most of the book takes place in deep space, so it only made sense to me to have that represented. Glance right–you can see why I’m pleased. :) And the ship emerging from the wormhole? That’s based on my deckplans for the actual ship in the novel!

In fact though, I’m glad now that not all of my suggestions were followed: I was very apprehensive about having any characters on the cover at all. I’ve seen too many covers with badly-executed characters (drawn, painted, or rendered) that immediately turn me off from reading the book. I voiced those concerns. However, I also provided the requested details about what the characters looked like, so that if the decision was made to put the main character on the cover, she could look as much as possible like I had envisioned her.

Then I sat back and chewed my nails.

I needn’t have worried. Tyche, and the artist, knew what they were doing. As soon as I had my first look at the cover concept I knew that everything was going to be all right. The character–that’s her. That’s Luta, pretty much exactly as I had envisioned her. And I still had numerous opportunities along the way to lend my voice to the project–did I like the concept? The colors? Luta’s face? Her makeup?

The typeface came last, and again I was asked for input. Did I like it? (I loved it.) What about the colour outlining the letters? (We did some experimenting to see what looked best.)

All in all, I felt very involved in the process, and made to feel that my input was valuable. That I had a stake, and a say, in what my novel was going to look like. Which, I know, is definitely not always the way it goes for the author, but is surely the proper way to go about things.