The Moon Etherium Cover Art & Poll

[rowyn]

I set a release date for The Moon Etherium, my magic-rich fantasy romance: September 26!

That means it's time to freak out about the cover some more!

So I spent like 20 hours working on a painting for the cover several weeks ago. I have become increasingly less happy with it.  I tweaked a few things about it  that particularly bothered me, and I'm okay with it now. But I'm not sure it's the best possible choice.

I fiddled with some alternates a couple of weeks ago, and while my quick Twitter poll favored one of them, I kind of hated it. I decided to do some more variants on the same general theme. I actually did five total, but I'm only showing the one I like best here. And a poll, of course.  Because poll.

The lettering is a placeholder, so don't worry about that part. alinsa will be doing the actual text layout. I just threw some words on so it would look cover-ish.


[Poll #2054073]

Comments

[rowyn]

I weight your vote several times more heavily than anybody else's! The general tide is very strongly against my painting style, though. :/ Someday I will get it together and either become a master artist or succeed at hiring a talented one.

... I am not sure which of these is more unlikely. I mean, I'd ASSUME hiring one is easier and would take approximately 1/10,000th the time. And YET. -_-

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

My concern is that the similarity in styles will trick people into thinking this is a new series set in the same setting, or that it's the same series, just a different set of books in it. Hopefully the strong contrast in colors will make it obvious it's not, but then when you get to The Sun Etherium... well, we're back to warm colors again.

I can appreciate everyone saying they like the silhouette covers, but they are (helpfully) approaching this book as if it's your only one. I'm looking at your entire work for sale as a whole and saying 'How do we help people figure out which book belongs with which series, and which book to buy next?'

I want you to avoid making the mistakes I did with branding. You have two (now three) books to sell, so it's still early enough that you can keep these things from getting out of hand. If you do what I did and wait until you have 20+ books out, fixing the branding issues so readers can figure out what belongs with what... that becomes horrible and I want to spare you that. -_-

[rowyn]

*nodnods*

I'm gonna try adding some subtle shading to The Moon Etherium cover, so it's not quite as flat/papercut-style as A Rational Arrangement. For The Sun Etherium, I'd use sky-blue instead of purple for the background, with a white sun (that will not be the dominant feature like the moon is for TME). That'll hopefully keep it away from the cream and browns of ARA while still looking like a day-lit scene.

Assuming I don't have someone else re-do TME and do TSE's cover, like a sensible author. -_-