When I first considered publishing my books I was surprised by a lot of things. I didn’t realize everything that went into production. And one of the best surprises was when I started cover design. It’s extremely overwhelming at times, but it’s also a ton of fun and rewarding. I have the pleasure of working with a great cover designer, Andrei Bat. He’s creative, hard working, fast and best of all, he puts up with my nit-picking and perfectionist tendencies.

Here’s a tidbit about the cover for Awoken and how I landed Andrei. I ran a contest on 99 Designs to find my cover artist. That’s right, a contest. I was so overwhelmed with the options that I decided that was the best approach. Andrei was pretty much the clear winner from the beginning. However, I thought it might be fun to show some of the covers that were runner-ups. And I’ve even included one of the earlier covers of Andrei’s. It give you  the insight into all the changes and tweaks that go into creating a striking cover.

Here’s a runner-up who was super fun to work with, but just didn’t have that stunning aspect I was going for.

Each cover designer had a different take based on the brief I provided. I really thought this one was compelling.

And as a bonus, here’s one of the earlier versions of Awoken. You can see all the changes Andrei made before we had the final cover. I had him rotate, fix hands, midsection and shoes, as well as a few other things.