Author Sandy Lender is on a Goddess Fish Virtual Book Tour, and she stopped by to talk about the covers of her latest book, Problems on Eldora Prime.The tagline intrigues me: "Some days, you just want the dragon to win."
Cool, right? Here's Eldora:
"You have probably heard how much authors get frustrated by the cover design that ends up on our books, but I've been lucky with all my books with all three of the publishers I work with. And I love both covers for Problems on Eldora Prime. That's right, the book has two covers. Let me explain that bizarre situation.
"You wanted to know if I had an idea for the cover already in mind as I was writing the book and that's a 'no.' I wrote the book as part of a three-day novel writing contest, so all I was thinking about was write, write, write for 72 hours. Marketing and cover stuff wasn't on my mind until after the publishing process was well underway about 12 months later.
"My publisher did ask for my input because he and I were working closely together on the project. The input I gave was the background picture (and the back cover copy). See, for my day job, I'm a magazine editor, and I had a friend in the construction industry who'd submitted some pictures for an article in that magazine. One of those pictures was this gorgeous scenery shot of the Rocky Mountains. Something about it triggered the memory of a scene from the foothills of the mountains of Eldora Prime in my mind, so I asked his permission to use the picture for my book. He was delighted...as was my publisher.
"The publisher added the silhouette of Khiry (the awesome main character!) and the flying dragon and styled the text. So when I first saw the finished product, I was floored. I loved it. The dragon really stole the show for me. I love dragons, as you can tell from my other books.
"Then we ran into problems with print quality once we got into production, which is always heartbreaking. (The same thing happened with an even more recent book of mine called Desecrated Ring from Keith Publications. The artist had to revamp the fairy ring on the front cover at the last minute because of quality issues, but the second version is still awesome, see above. These artists are far more talented at this stuff than I could hope to be.)
"This is why Problems on Eldora Prime has two covers. The eBook format has the original cover (above) because it shows up just fine in all the electronic formats. The paperback format has the new cover (right), without Khiry or the dragon, because we had to do a fast-n-furious redo at the last minute during production. So I guess you could say the cover DID change a bit from the original version I saw...if you're looking at the right version. No matter which cover you're looking at, it captures the mood and eeriness of Eldora Prime. I couldn't have found a better image for that planet than what my friend took of the Rocky Mountains.
"Thank you for letting me share the experience with your visitors. If anyone has questions about the process, I'll be checking in to answer them!"
Thanks, Sandy! I have to say that I really like the dragon silhouette flying in the sky, and I wish that had somehow stayed in the second version. But I'm glad both covers have a place, and I think the lighter colors on the second cover work well.
If anyone has questions for Sandy, she'll drop in to answer them. Happy Monday!
sandy lender