ANNIHILATION ARIA cover + design process (Patreon)

Hello again, lovely Patreon people! Just yesterday I shared news about ANNIHILATION ARIA, my next novel, coming May 4th, 2020. The response so far has been amazing and I am so greatful for your excitement and support.

Everyone else will get to see ARIA's cover next week, when Parvus does the wide cover reveal. But y'all get it early. 

Here's the ANNIHILATION ARIA cover wrap in progress, including the front cover and the art that will serve as the background once Parvus adds the rest of the trade dress (title and byline on the spine, cover copy, barcode, etc. on the back). 

The cover is created by Tom Edwards Design. You should definitely check out his website.

Parvus has worked with Tom Edwards before and was excited to have him bring the world and story to life and the result blew me away.

I love the purple synthwave-y lettering for the title and byline. It makes my 80s kid heart soar.

The Process

While you're here, I figured I could go a step farther and talk a little about the development process that went into getting this cover. I've talked before about art briefs and my experience doing art direction at Angry Robot. For ARIA, I wasn't the art director myself, but I got a lot of input in working with Parvus. Colin Coyle and I had several conversations about the book and how we wanted to represent it in the cover. Very quickly, we came to a consensus that we wanted ARIA to have One of Those Space Opera covers, But Distinct, rather than leaning hard in another direction. 

Space Opera of the last decade has a very distinctive cover style, one that's crystallized in the past few years as the sub-genre has really returned to prominence. 

You probably know what I'm talking about - Cool spaceship flying across the cover, in space, flying from, to, or in front of some celestial body - a star, a moon, etc. This style's been used from Ann Leckie's landmark Imperial Radch series to indie space opera hits like Chris Fox's Destroyer.

We didn't set out to break the formula, but we did want the cover to *stand out* when you set it next to the many hundreds of space opera novels that use this style.

In talking with Colin, we came up with a few major elements to focus on in the cover:

The Kettle (the heroes' ship)
Shattered Planets (destroyed by a super-weapon)
Giant Space Turtles
Majestic Ancient Architecture

As you can see in Tom Edwards' cover, we fit most of them into one composition, with The Kettle flying through the debris of a shattered world-turned-asteroid-field, toward a giant golden palace-temple.

I love the sense of motion for The Kettle, the bright gold of the temple palace, the purple light as contrast, the same purple as the lettering. 

The choice to use purple neon-style lettering really helps the cover stand out as well as resonating with the cultural context of the book's influences (Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, etc.) The high contrast of the gold and purple with the blue helps the eye focus on the important elements. Even at the small thumbnail size (how you'd see the cover on a mobile browser or an online retailer), the lettering, the ship, and the temple are still distinct and say "space opera".