Daylight War: Evolution of a Cover (2 of 3) – UK
See part 1 of this 3 part post here.
If memory serves*, it all started in Melbourne, Australia during Worldcon 2010. I was having dinner with Emma Coode, my UK editor. People had been lining up (sometimes coming from great distance) to get their books signed and rave about them. It was my first real taste of enthusiastic readers in person, and kind of amazing.
*Note: Memory seldom serves. All conversations paraphrased.
We started talking excitedly about the next book, though I was still in the early stages of writing.
“The boys have done really well on the covers,” Emma said (you’ll have to add the British accent in your head), “but your books have so many wonderful female characters that we want to feature a woman on the cover of the next book.”
She said this as if I might want to debate the point. There is BS conventional marketing “wisdom” that books with women on the covers don’t sell as well as those featuring men, but I don’t buy that for a second.
“Shit, yeah!” I cried. “That’s a great idea. Who should we do? Leesha?”
“Well,” Emma said, “Leesha is certainly a lead character worthy of a cover, but visually, we think Renna would be a more exciting choice.”
“Agreed,” I said without hesitation. I had just commissioned a painting of Renna for my website, and was working on the Arlen & Renna portions of Daylight War at the time. I was all for featuring her on the cover.
Many months later, Emma sent me this Rostant painting, asking for my thoughts.
My first reaction was “Holy Wow! Yes!” The faded blackstem wards and the serious look on her face, the flare of magic in the background. It was an awesome image. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was doing—It looked like when the Hulk punches the ground to knock his enemies off their feet—but it looked cool as hell.
I wrote back saying that if they just ran with that image unchanged, I would sleep well at night, but if there was still time to tweak, Renna’s hair, described in the books as having been chopped off with her knife save for a single braid in the back, could be fixed. And her clothes were a little different.
I heard back some time later that the cover did not pass the full team meeting at Voyager, and they were planning to re-shoot. By this point, I was a lot further along in writing, and proposed that they consider Inevera for the cover instead. Daylight War was quickly shaping up to be Inevera’s book, and she has a distinct and exotic look, described in detail in the books.
Sometime later, I received Larry’s rough sketch:
Oooh, I thought, this could be good. I sent back some notes about hair, clothes, and jewelry, and of course noted that there are no swords in my books, so Inevera, not a fighter in any event, would certainly not have one. Larry went ahead with his full cover shoot, and a few weeks later, this arrived in my inbox:
Awesome, right? Another cover that could have been amazing. The model’s eyes grab hold of you and won’t let go. I wasn’t sure about the color at first, but it grew on me over time. I wrote back with a similar “This is great, here are some tweaks…” e-mail. My main concern was that the lower two-thirds of the image were a bit of a blur. Voyager agreed, switching to a different pose larry had sent:
Holy shit, I thought. Hell yes, let’s use that! But Voyager didn’t want to show too much of Inevera’s face, and there was a bit too much sexy going on at the hips to pass marketing muster. It evolved to this:
Lots of back and forth, right? Well we were just getting started. The above was exciting and awesome, but there were lots of spoons in the soup, and there was no consensus. It ended up going back to Larry for an unprecedented third photoshoot. The original model wasn’t available, so a new one was chosen:
This was the result:
Yow. Lot of power going on there. Especially the way she’s… breaking out of a giant block of ice? They changed the background to a more Demon Cycle-style fading light, and on my request tweaked the knife a bit, and added more translucency to the veil for the stunning final version that went on to debut at #3 on the London Times Bestseller list:
The final one was the very best, and I can’t really imagine it being different.