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 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:
Formats dictate cover size, and each printer will have their own printing templates. For our Kickstarter, we offered the luxe paperback with french flaps, foiled and embossed covers and flaps. It also has duplex color on the insde of the cover. This mean the art process required formatting a full wrap (standard paperback) and also the flaps (traditional dust jacket).
I could not have completed this project without the ongoing assistance of both JF and Roxanne (another artist who worked with Martial Hero on the later formats). As the one publishing this book, I had to take it from digital to physical print which had a number of steps and quality assurance back and forth that takes repeated communications and adjustments from the artist. So while it was paramount to find an excellent printer, it is equally critical to work with a responsive artist who you can follow up with for any revisions the printer requires.
