So, back in April this year, I had a stall (along with a bunch of other indie authors) in the Dealers room at Eastercon in Belfast. Our table was positioned right next door to Guardbridge books, a small press publisher. The publisher spent some time looking at my postcards and prints for sale and took a fancy to one of them (which he bought) because it had a particular look he liked. We discussed cover designs and he asked if I would be able to do a cover for an upcoming book.

I said yes… and started making plans. This included, on the way back home through the airport, taking a photo of something that I would later use…

There was a slight delay while he sorted things out with the author but we finally got round to discussing plans. I would recruit some models to portray characters from the book (descriptions helpfully sent) and we would do a photoshoot at Frameworks Studio in Ancoats, Manchester. I would then do a composite image.

The two models I picked were Gregg (AKA Demonsloth modelling) and Saskia Collinson. Both were briefed on what the characters looked like and we discussed things like make up, props and clothing. Some of these we had between us, other things we had to buy. But we had a budget to work with. I set this up with three lights – a large studio light as main light, a speedlight to light up the background to allow good separation in post processing and a second speedlight with a red filter. This was added because, in the planned layout, there would be a red sun outside the spacestation window.

We did a number of different poses, both together and apart to see what worked best. We also shot some images for the models to use for their own purposes. A few of these are shown below.

Finally, I had the process of putting together the final image.

For this, I used the models from the shoot and a number of other elements. I started with a standard book template after discussing with the publisher what the dimensions of the final book would be. This allowed a back and front cover as well as an idea of the size of the spine of the book. The first thing I added to this was a photograph of a walkway. This was to be our spacestation. I replaced the scene from the windows with a starscape and added some features like LED lights that I had photographed in one of my regular weekly camera club nights. I also added some other features outside the space station. These were all blended in to look like part of the scene. In the initial draft, I used an image of both models…

However, this didn’t work for a number of reasons. The first was that the male character is the poV character and this is written in the style of a classic detective noir story which means you never really know what the main character looks like. The publisher and author were keen we don’t see his face. However, the attempts to anonymise him didn’t really work well. The second was that the publisher felt the female character looked too passive in this – very bored and disinterested. So, we discussed options and decided that our main character detective would be moved to the back cover and be more or less entirely blacked out – full ‘man of mystery’ mode. Like the image below.

At the same time, I selected a more dynamic single pose of Saskia from the selection and that would become the sole subject on the front cover.

Once the draft for that was approved, I went ahead and finalised the image. We had some discussion about saturation levels and a strange green tint on skin but we finally had a completed image which was sent off to the printers with the rest of the book…

Cassius Station: Heist by Gustavo Bondoni will be released at the Seattle Worldcon later this month with Gustavo doing signed copies for sale at the Guardbridge stall. it will then be on wider release by the 1st of September…

And I guess I am a cover designer now. Might have to explore doing this more in the future.