The Burning Throne cover design saga

As with everything, I go on quite a lot so please bare with me as I go through why I didn't chose all the covers and I wanted to make my own. I will also, in this blog poast, show you the final cover.

Photo covers

This was the photo that inspired two locations in the novel: the Throne room and the party room. I thought that, because I couldn't go back to the original place where I took the photo to get a less blurry one, that there's no point using this cover, as very little can be done to help it stand out at this aspect ration, and when I took it I wans't planning on publishing and doing my own cover design and just liked taking photos.

The first castle cover is my second favourite of the covers because of the location where I took it. I took it the first day that (| saw my beautiful partner for the first time (which was very aquard and I almost lost her lol) and so it holds such a special place in my heart. Its the Southampton castle ruins, and as I grew up in this city and went to uni here, I wanted to pay homage to it. However, I've got a few plans in the works for it ;)

The cloudy day on this final photo cover really helped me out cause I didn't have to alter it very much. However, from the angle of the photo, it didn't work well. This was simply because there's a church in the novel, sure, and it would work with the rest of the series, but I didn't like the whole vibe of it. I could have brought the tagline down.

'abstract' covers

This was the first failure. I personally both love and hate this cover because it was stupidly hard to produce. The cover, is also, very imsemtrical and i hate it for that reason. I do, however, love the back font and also the overall design, just not the abstractness of it, as I think that al the cool secrets I hid in it might never be appricated because of the small font sise. Then again people read legal documents and they're in two font so I don't know what that's about or why I'm worrying.

This cover is just a more simple version of the one above, mostly in size eight or size twelve font. I wanted to do something that was more readable, but I couldn't fit as many secrets in, so I decided against it.

This cover is one of the less abstract and more 'realistic' ones. I wanted to try my hand at more realism and try one with just the Throne across the pages to see what it feels like. I felt that the image was too stretched, and like the first photo cover, that it was too blurry to be done when printed.

The final cover

Before I go and tell you the reason why I wanted to do the cover in this style, I want to tell you why the others didn't work. I'm a big beleiver of collectors editions, the idea that the editions should be available to everyone in a way that is uniform and makes a collection - not only a single volume - and I want to give you, the reader, a good personal connection to this peice and have it look good on a shelf. A paperback book, now, is considered in publishing terms as a luxury item with the invent on e-readers. My job, therefore, is to provide an item that looks good on a shelf, and I think that this cover will look great on a shelf!