All in a cover


It's impossible to underestimate how important a book's cover is to its sales impact. Not only is it the best advertising for the book, it's the only advertising most books get.

Red Dragon Rising has now reached its climax with its fourth installment. The cover of the first book set a high standard as well as a distinct look, and no doubt played an important role in the series' success. Subsequent books have continued to have a very cool and instantly recognizable look.

But that didn't make things easy when it came time to create the cover for book 4, Red Dragon Rising: Blood of War. Here's an abbreviated look at the evolution, beginning with the first book we saw.*

This was the first cover that we saw, though I'm sure it had gone through a series of changes and artistic debates. It is a FANTASTIC cover. There's only one problem - well, two actually.

First of all, the action shown doesn't have much relation to what's in the book, and the weapons are wrong - two things long-time series readers were sure to pick up on. Secondly, the image is somewhat reminiscent of the cover of the first book, and we were afraid it just wouldn't stand up next to it.

So it was back to the drawing board. A lot of the critical action in the book takes place at sea, so I did up a rather horrible sketch to illustrate our ideas. In the interests of full disclosure and a belly of laughs I'm sure, here it is.

Hey, I never said I was an artist. The idea was simply to show the artist what we were talking about.

After the artist stopped laughing (I'm sure), we got this back. Again, a FANTASTIC cover:

Dramatic, dynamic, sets a great tone. But again, problems. First, there is no American aircraft carrier in the book, and second, while it is theoretically possible to have attack helicopters landing on a carrier, they're not in the book either.

So even though it was a great cover, the artist had to go back to the drawing board. We next saw a series of covers that included this image:

This time, the artist puts us aboard a Navy destroyer, and manages to get a very dynamic situation. I guess in retrospect we could have nitpicked about the helos, but we were so blown away by the great image we thought readers would be too.

Here's the final, final version, on sale this week:

Throw a few kind words in there about Larry (and me, actually), and we're good to go.

* - I've culled a few steps in the interest of brevity.