If a picture is worth a thousand words, a cover may be worth ten thousand. It’s the reason why you give a book a second glance and pick it up. It should convey the feelings of the book (but not necessarily the literal exact scenes of the book).
I had worked with Saiyre Illustration before on our previous book Ebony Gate and she drew a beautiful piece of Emiko and Bao. So when I saw this Four Season series from her, I asked if we could license the art of Spring Tranquility for the cover.
So much goes into a book cover because in addition to the art, the font choice and placement is critical. Luckily, we had the talents of JF Lee, who in addition to being a wonderful author is just a genius with graphic design.
We loved the classic feel of the image and JF wanted to juxtapose a modern, clean font to convey the contemporary edge of some of the stories contained with the anthology.
Then we started to play around with the author images and it gave us the ultimate effect we were looking for.
Similarly, JF worked hard on crafting a number of compilations and images for the Kickstarter campaign itself. Here’s one of the cyberpunk wuxia ones:
Julia Vee 