The Hunt for a Wicked Book Cover

One thing that excites me the most about self-pub­lish­ing my book, GOLIATH FALLEN, is design­ing the cov­er. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cov­er. But, when I con­sid­er how my book will appear next to heavy­weights like To Sleep On A Sea of Stars, The Mar­t­ian, Dark Mat­ter, or lit­er­al­ly any fan­ta­sy nov­el, I would pre­fer not to take my chances. I need a cov­er wor­thy of the six years of hard work I’ve put into writ­ing this book. Design­ing a book cov­er is by no means an easy task, so I pre­fer to hand it off to a professional.

My current book cover

As I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous post, I’ve been shar­ing my draft on sites like Wattpad to get my book in front of beta read­ers and do some infor­mal mar­ket­ing. I used a cov­er I put togeth­er in Can­va with art designed by the incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed @naked.monkey and some basic let­ter­ing. This cov­er went through a few iter­a­tions using the same art but with dif­fer­ent col­or grad­ing to test what worked bet­ter to attract read­ers. Here’s the lat­est ver­sion, which received very pos­i­tive feed­back on Wattpad and led to almost dou­ble the num­ber of month­ly reads:

When I saw @naked.monkey’s Astronot piece, I fell in love at first sight. The art cap­tured the mood of my sto­ry to per­fec­tion: dev­as­ta­tion, iso­la­tion, urgency. I did­n’t hes­i­tate a sec­ond in reach­ing out to him to ask for per­mis­sion to use it for my book cov­er. He was kind enough to license it to me for non-prof­it pur­pos­es for a small fee. I added the let­ter­ing myself, which is quite basic giv­en that I’m not a pro­fes­sion­al design­er. Goliath Fall­en could become a best­seller, but this cov­er will always have a spe­cial place in my heart. How­ev­er, the time for an update is here. To pub­lish on Ama­zon KDP (or any oth­er dig­i­tal store), I need art that I can use com­mer­cial­ly for both ebook and paper­back ver­sions. The lat­ter is trick­i­er since it includes the entire jack­et: front, back, spine, and interior.

Finding a wicked book cover artist

I start­ed my hunt for a cov­er design­er on Reedsy. If I thought pick­ing a show or movie to watch on Net­flix was over­whelm­ing and time-inten­sive, find­ing the right free­lancer on sites like these is an almost insur­mount­able task. I’ve nev­er com­mis­sioned work on a free­lance plat­form before, and it proved to be a scary endeav­or. I spent hours brows­ing through the count­less pro­files that showed up in my search results until I even­tu­al­ly stum­bled upon Ale­jan­dro Coluc­ci. I almost fell from my chair when I saw his port­fo­lio. His illus­tra­tions are sim­ply mind-bog­gling. They’re hand-drawn and full of strik­ing, emo­tion­al detail. This one, in par­tic­u­lar, caught my attention:

Like, are you kid­ding me? That’s Ger­ald of Riv­ia. It took me a while to real­ize Ale­jan­dro had also designed the first cov­er for The Witch­er series. I was ecsta­t­ic to find him on Reedsy and open to new clients. Not only is he tal­ent­ed beyond descrip­tion, but he was also super nice, hum­ble, and easy­go­ing when I reached out to him. He answered all of my ques­tions and even con­sid­ered my sketch­es. (Some clients try to hijack cre­ative con­trol from the artist, which is a big no-no.)

As I expect­ed, Ale­jan­dro’s quote was in the upper end of my bud­get­ed range, but it’ll be worth every pen­ny if my book cov­er ends up look­ing any­thing like what he’s pro­duced pre­vi­ous­ly. After fill­ing his inbox with ques­tions and receiv­ing sat­is­fy­ing answers and peace of mind, I seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with him. I no longer need to look any fur­ther. I pro­vid­ed him with a detailed brief doc­u­ment, ref­er­ence images, and descrip­tions, and I’m now on pins and nee­dles wait­ing to see how it will turn out.

So, there you have it—our first item from the list is now crossed off. I have to admit, it has been as much work and as exhaust­ing as I expect­ed it to be. But, I know it will all be worth it in the end.

Stay tuned for a cov­er reveal!

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