The Brooding Crown Release Date & Cover!!

Hi!!!

I've been looking forward to this post for AGES! I'm super excited to at last share the cover of The Brooding Crown: The Second Book of Caledan with you!

I can also at last share the publication date:

The Brooding Crown will be released

on Thursday July 16th 2015!

This is my favourite project ever - I have loved working on it every minute and cannot wait to share it.

So - what do you think?

This took 5 hours of illustration by hand and closely ties in to the cover of The Tainted Crown. The Tainted Crown features the royal crown of Caledan, whereas The Brooding Crown features the royal crown of Roher, a country you will be seeing lots more of in The Brooding Crown!

That's all the spoilers you're getting for now, but I'll be releasing the first chapters to my mailing list. Sign up to receive them!

Hope you like it! Feedback welcome as always. :-)

Meg

COVER RELEASE - The Tainted Crown: The First Book of Caledan

Behold! The new cover for The Tainted Crown :D


and... here's how I created it!

It took me 10 hours of illustration work on the crown alone (in Photoshop using my trusty Wacom Intuos 4) and about an hour of playing about to format and arrange the elements to create the cover image. This will be the kindle format image - I'll have to create another format/arrangement for the paperback version and other ebook formats. :-)

The crown itself was super fun (though time-consuming...!) to create. Although my initial visions of the crown were almost identical to the Palatine Crown of Queen Anne, wife of Richard II, the final image was much more inspired by the crown of Queen Maria of Romania, which has a beautiful, flowing design.

During the process I honed my metal painting skills and I also learnt how to create faceted jewels with this epic tutorial! The blood was really fun to do also. I had to hand paint the crown's reflection onto it, but it was worth doing to make the image feel more believable (liquids reflect, after all).

The backlighting/glow behind the crown helps it to pop away from the blue cover background - and the contrast between the blue background and yellow crown again helps that stand out as the focal point for the cover. I kept in mind Joel Friedlander's advice on good cover design for ebooks as I was creating this, trying to keep it simple and eye-catching, so that it will also be effective on a small scale.

I textured the background to make it more interesting (aiming for not too much blank space, but not too much detail, as either would be distracting). For the texture, I used a photo of a weathered iron grate I took at Upper Barden Reservoir - so there's a little bit of Yorkshire in my book cover!

I also used Joel's advice to improve my typography (the font, words and placement of text), which was, let's face it... pretty bad in my very first cover design! This can really make or break a cover.

Overall, I think it comes together as a much more effective cover than the previous version - I still really love the illustration on the previous cover, just as a standalone image. I'll probably offer both images as signed prints when the book is released. :-)

Hope you like!

If you're interested in cover design, here's a list of really useful resources to check out: 

15 Articles on Cover Design for Self-Publishers, by Joel Friedlander

Self Publishing: Cover Design, by CompletelyNovel 

Four steps to create a great cover for your self-published book, by Anna Lewis

(VIDEO content!) Book Cover Design: The Process Explained With Joel Friedlander, The Book Designer, by Joanna Penn

Ciao for now!

Meg