My cover art vs the finished article…

As an indie writer I have to sort out my own cover art. Thankfully I have some great professionals who can take my rough ideas and ridiculous sketches and turn them into the great images you see on the final product.

Below is my original idea for the Friar Tuck and the Christmas Devil cover. It was sketched in my diary when I was out at work and, as you can see, I hadn’t even decided on the final title at the time. To be fair, since this novella is part of the Kindle Singles Programme, Amazon offered to have a cover sorted for me, but I’d already commissioned this, and I wanted the continuity with the other books so… we went with this.

I asked for the blood stains and the holly berries to be a very striking red, while the holly leaves had to be very green. The colours symbolise the novella’s overall theme of death (winter, and the Christmas Devil) versus life (the new green of Spring, and Tuck himself).

I really, really like the cover my designers came up with, and so many people have told me this is my best artwork so far. All the previous books had a figure on the front – Robin Hood for the Forest Lord novels and Sir Richard-at-Lee for Knight of the Cross. With this one I decided to go for something different. It worked well!

The designers have my ideas for the next, final Forest Lord novel, Blood of the Wolf, and I’ll share it with you as soon as they complete it. Hopefully it’ll be as striking as all the rest and, perhaps, symbolic too…

My cover designers, More Visual, have created fantastic artwork for people like David Pilling, Anna Belfrage, Gordon Doherty and Patricia Cornwell. If you need a cover, get in touch with them!