Monthly Cover Fun
At Least Fun for Me…
Every month with Smith’s Monthly I get to do all the covers for the short stories in the issue, plus the exterior cover. And sometimes I put the covers here.
This month was fairly easy, actually. There are ten short stories in this issue and one novel. But the six of the short stories are in a collection I put together, so I had already done the covers and the cover for the collection. (The entire collection is in the issue.)
And one of the short stories was in an another collection I just put out, so that cover is already done as well. So I had the issue cover and three original short stories to do covers for. But even the issue was an easy cover since I already had the art from Issue #17 and the novel in the issue is being brought forward from #17 since the next book (in #56) takes some background I thought I would give readers.
But still had to do the cover and the wrap cover on that.
So here is the issue front cover and also the three original short story covers. They were fun to do.
4 Comments
Philip
That first cover is my favorite because I’ve been pretty much exclusively writing westerns the last year. Similar to your process, my process starts with brainstorming titles and that gives me a jumping off point to write into the dark, but I also noticed when I design a great cover, it gets the creative voice going.
Yesterday, I did a classic DWS move like you describe in Stories From July (a must read for anyone who follows this blog). I wrote in little tiny spurts between watching football and cleaning my apartment throughout the day. If I were under surveillance, people would say I never put in a real writing session. Yet, at the end of the night, I somehow had 2,209 words on my novel (written totally into the dark–just a title and cover to get me going). It’s like you say, it’s about consistency and it all adds up. You don’t have to go to the salt mines and pound keys for 8 hours. Now at this rate I’ll be close to Pulp Speed one at year-end with around 800,000 words.
dwsmith
Thanks, Philip. And yup, bits here and bits there really work and add up. If I had to wait around for a large chunk of writing time, I would’t get much of anything done.
Phillip Quinn Morris
I have to say all these covers certainly communicate an interesting 3D character. A character whom you know has a story worth reading. Very good job!
dwsmith
Thanks. All fiction is about character, so that is automatic to me. I just was going for the genre and feel of the story more than anything else.