Bone Witch Book Cover

The Kickstarter for The Bone Witch continues to develop! Here’s some backstage peeks at cover art and how it comes to life. If you haven’t already, be sure to click Notify Me on the Kickstarter to hear all about it when the project goes live.

Lets judge this book by its cover

Cover art is a complicated milestone for a book. It needs to have clear and easy to read text, but the font also has to somehow convey the genre. The image needs to be both on brand, but also on trope. The text on the back needs to be legible of course, but it also needs to talk about the characters, their conflicts, the world, and also somehow capture reader imagination!

The cover has a lot of heavy lifting to do and only about half a second to do it before attention moves on. No pressure!

The Bone Witch collections are a few things that need to be very clear at a glance: there’s a black MC (representation matters!), the genre is urban fantasy, it’s NOT romance.

When I reached out to my artist for this project I also had several bone details I wanted woven into the design. But trying to transmit the vision in my head, over text, to someone else, is a feat and revisions are inevitable.

Here’s what that process looks like:

Tami! You might think. THIS IS SO COOL! And you’d be right. The designer absolutely nailed the character (Nariah) and the snake (Sin) right from the start. They also put a skull in the title, which I love, and the spooky atmosphere is perfect.

What could I possibly need to change, then? SO MUCH STUFF

First, I wasn’t thrilled with the font they chose for the title. It feels a little too middle grade for a collection of adult stories. I also wasn’t sold on the skull icon they chose and I had forgotten entirely to give them my publishing logo for the back cover. I also wanted a little more movement in the magic Nariah holds in her hands. Something that would draw the eye in toward the center.

Can you see all the adjustments they made in this version? They nailed the magic swirls, I love this new font and the fact that it’s bone-colored. They made my name along the top larger (easier to read!) and now there’s a logo on the back.

But that SKULL

Friends I had to laugh when I opened this version of the cover, that skull looks even MORE like a cartoon than the previous one. NO, that skull has to go.

I also noticed that my name on the spine and the text on the back were still white—that needed to change to match the bone-color of everything else.

And here we come to the final cover. I decided the first skull icon worked just fine in this more adult font, all the text is a unified color, and I’m still obsessed with how perfect the character art is.

This entire process took a little over a month with about a dozen incremental versions between the first and the final before I was happy with the results, but I’m glad to spend the time to get something so important Just Right. This will be the cover for this collection for years to come, it needs to do its job well AND be pretty to look at.

I’m confident that this will succeed in that role.