I’m still officially on vacation, but I did sneak onto the computer a few times this past week to put the finishing touches on a cover for one of our spring releases, and I thought it might be interesting for everyone to see how it actually evolved.
The book in question is a satire about death–an obituary editor gets a taste of the new and improved afterlife, in which corporate image and downsizing have revolutionized eternity. Along the way, he crosses paths and story lines with an assortment of strange and interesting characters, which we wanted to incorporate into the cover design. So we gave our cover illustrator, the incredibly talented KL Gaffney, a few sample chapters, as well as a list of characters to choose from, and told her to go and have fun.
This was the rough sketch we then chose from three initial concepts:
We did some shuffling of elements based on author comments, and then some more shuffling because we’re nitpicky, and ended up with this sketch:
This was the final colorized cover our illustrator delivered:
And this is the image that is about to be uploaded to the printer to generate a printed proof:
End Credits will be released in April 2008.