Cover Reveal – Gimme Shelter, Broken Skies, Tishla

The changes aren’t in place yet, but I’ve either revamped or had replaced the covers of Gimme Shelter, Broken Skies, and Tishla.

For starters, there is Gimme Shelter, originally the first ten chapters of The Children of Amargosa.

I liked the image I ultimately used – a home-brewed Photoshop planet against a Hubble image of a nebula and a phantom hand reaching out from the cosmos.

The typeface on the original, however, never blended properly. And I got rid of the tagline. I’m getting rid of all my taglines. It’s extra print in a third font that just clutters up the cover.

Here, I’ve replaced the text color with a gray tone and drop shadow, moved the title to the bottom, and rendered it (appropriately) in a font called Space Marine.

It looks better, but I have to not only update the front and back matter of the book, but also the print version and its cover components.

For Broken Skies, I’ve done away with Battleship Generica. On the current cover is a ship that turned up on a dozen other books after I bought the stock photo. A couple of people warned me, but I hadn’t seen it before. Wish I listened.

I needed something that still conveyed the story as well as the Generica. So I gave my font and color needs to Michael Dirk Thalmann. And you need to read Mike’s Static, Europa Affair, and 13 Lives of a Television Repairman.

He found the image displayed here and churned out several versions. My fiancee told me I liked this version.

As with Gimme Shelter, I have a print version to work up. Which means new back cover and spine. But it’ll be available by the end of the month.

And finally, we have Tishla, possibly the best novella of the bunch so far. However, it has, shall we say, an image problem. The first cover model was perfect, looked quite a bit like how I imagined Tishla to look.

But then I updated it because I’d used that model on a previous cover. Any new pics of her looked like a jewelry model, not exactly the kickass image I was looking for. So I found another platinum blonde.

Who has been described as a soft porn actress. I did not really like how it was being received.

MD Thalmann to the rescue. He found this image of an alien woman against a space background. I had him gray her skin. This actually was the first one I paid Mike for, so the fonts are a bit off.

Warped and “Headspace” are next, along with ditching the retro 3-D font for No Marigolds in the Promised Land.

Finally, the covers are starting to look good.