I have published four novels and have a fifth one coming up this year. One of the most important exercises in putting out a book is getting a good book cover.

Two of my books have covers that I designed myself. I am not a graphic designer, so how good an idea it is for me to be designing my own covers is debatable. But I did enlist the help of talented artists for three of my books.

The first time I ever commissioned book cover art was when I contacted Moxie Moth, an artist who is the daughter of an old friend of mine. I chose her to come up with some artwork for my novel The Falling Circle because, asides from being an admirer of her artwork, she is also down with the same scenes and circles I travel in, the Goth/Punk/OMG-what-the-hell scenes of the Bohemian underground, so she was the perfect choice to illustrate my tale of crazy gutter punks living life on the edge.

I sent her some excerpts of the novel to give her an idea of what the main character Preston is like. She came up with several sketches and the punks-in-the-alleyway sketch was perfect. What I like about this cover is that it makes my work look like a graphic novel, which it isn’t, so it could be misleading a little bit maybe? In any case, I think it’s an excellent eye catcher.

Alleyway punks! Truly captures a scene, a mood,
and a style that fits this work perfectly!

After getting a new cover for my gutter punk novel I set about finding an artist to create some artwork for my dark Eighties novel The Clubber. I found the artist Bri Mellot when someone posted a commission of a Mellott cat portrait in one of my Facebook communities. Her style was perfect for what I wanted. I contacted her about commission work, and she replied that she had never done any book cover work before. As with Moxie, I sent her some excerpts of The Clubber to give her an idea of what the main character Andre is like. I must admit that the description I gave for the concept of this cover was a lot more vague than the details I gave to Moxie, but nevertheless Mellott came up with a piece that I have to say really floored me. It fit the mood of the work perfectly. It was surreal and elaborate, and also a good eye catcher.

I told her there had to be a skull in there somewhere.
I gave her a lot of license to use her imagination!

My upcoming novel features a main character who has been a main fixture of two of my previous works, my first attempt at a novel Gutter Folklore and addiction novel Crash Shadow. (Also the two books in which I designed the covers on my own.) Skye is a character who has been growing and evolving and taking on a life of her own for all of these years I’ve been writing stories about her. My soon-to-be-published work What the Hell Ever Happen to Yuri Rozhenko? is the story of her personal road trip up and down the West Coast of the United States. For this cover I contacted Helga Protiv, and artist whose works I found on a Facebook page Vagina Devil Magic, which posted her series of Goth archetypes. A prolific artist with her own singular style, I did the usual and sent Protiv excerpts of my novel-in-progress. She let me know that English is not her first language, (She hails from Russia,) so she might have a difficult time with some American slang. (And my work is quite heavy with Yankee slang!)

I gave Protiv a very detailed idea of what I wanted the scene for this cover art to be: Skye leaning on her old band sticker covered car, wearing a band shirt and ratty jeans with long ratty black hair. The details for this scene were much more specific than what I had given Moxie or Mellott.

Skye in downtown Los Angeles, standing by
her car in the midst of her road trip

As I said in my blog piece about the evolution of Skye as a character in my writing, I’ve “seen” her many times as I’ve written about her at various stages of her chaotic punk life. But when Protiv sent me her initial sketch of Skye it was the first time I saw her in “real life”. To actually see this character who has taken on a life of her own was a striking and moving moment for me. Preston and Andre, the main characters of The Falling Circle and The Clubber are important to me, but they haven’t evolved and come alive as Skye has in my work.

I have plans to get more commissions from all of these artists, especially with the plans to publish a lot more works. I definitely have a lot more plans for Skye as well.