Behind-the-scenes: the cover design process
Plus, the exclusive reveal of the Guild of Magic cover illustration!
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and for book covers, maybe make it 10,000?
Book covers need to attract the reader’s eye while they browse on Amazon or walk by a bookstore end table and immediately convey the genre and content of the book.
It’s a tall order, but fortunately, today’s cover illustrators and designers are up to the challenge.
For the Guild of Tokens special edition, I enlisted fantasy illustrator extraordinaire Felix Ortiz and design maven Shawn T. King to create the cover and they did not disappoint.
Below I walk through the various stages of the cover design process from idea to finished cover.
The first step in the process is the concept/design brief.
If you read what I'll refer to as “traditional” urban fantasy (think Jim Butcher, Ilona Andrews, etc.), you are probably familiar with the traditional urban fantasy cover of the main character on the cover front and center with a city skyline or maybe a magical animal in the background.
But Guild of Tokens is not that type of urban fantasy, so I needed to come up with a cover concept that said “urban fantasy” but one that was a touch different.
This is what I initially sent to Felix:
The book does not follow the typical urban fantasy tropes, and that kind of cover I don’t think really reflects what the book is about. Describing it as a fantasy book that takes place in a city with hints of epic fantasy woven in is a good description and what I was trying to go for with the prior cover.
I want to convey the hidden magic in New York City, so one thought was having a recognizable landmark, like the Washington Square Park arch and it’s half covered in otherwordly/magical stuff like vines, and piles of tokens and magical swords, but the other half is normal. And then maybe we have a small figure standing at the base looking up at the Arch.
Based on that, Felix sent me the below concept photos, along with the following description:
Imagine, if you please, vines and magic permeating the scene, with eerie lights coming from fog, and the like. Then tokens sort of floating around, and some in the foreground closer to the viewer.
After I decided on the first concept above, Felix started painting:
The other decision to make was whether Jen (who is depicted on the cover) would be facing forwards or backwards. To make the cover more personal, I decided that she should be facing forwards:
From here, Felix sent a near-final version to Shawn and myself for further tweaking. Based on our input, Felix adjusted the colors, removed the vines from the top of the lamp, and made Jen bigger to arrive at the final illustration below:
After the interior content was finalized, Shawn did his design magic to create the final covers for the ebook, paperback, and hardcover:
So there you have it.
And now, without further ado, please feast your eyes on Felix’s cover illustration for Guild of Magic. Shawn will be back to do the cover and interior design, and you can see the cover along with a process post over at FanFiAddict.