Gosh, I'm going to try my best to be as efficient as I can with this particular cover reveal post, because this is for the cover of my own debut novel and I can see myself getting lonnnnng-winded with it.
But I do need to start by saying that getting to design my own cover is a dream come true on top of this whole book dream come true, and definitely one of the reasons I wanted to try my luck pitching my novel to Laura Stanfill and Forest Avenue Press. There are other reasons too, of course—Forest Avenue Press is the best indie press out there—but getting to not only have my own vision for the cover realized, but also be the one to "realize" it is certainly a big one.
I don't know when the concept for the cover first presented itself to me—definitely before I had a final draft in hand. I think of my novel as the lovechild of Groundhog Day and Raymond Chandler, if that child got babysat by The Twilight Zone and learned to speak by listening to nothing but old time radio detective shows. Here's the official publisher description:
Third-rate gumshoe One the Gun and his trusty sidekick Two the True Blue are hired to track down the killer of Five the No Longer Alive. But while he grills suspects and hunts for clues, One the Gun starts to notice that today is exactly like yesterday—in fact, maybe actually is yesterday—and he’s also pretty sure that at the very end of yesterday he was shot to death. Time continues to loop back on itself, and one murder case becomes two as the private eye races against the clock to discover his own killer before the day that was yesterday turns over to become tomorrow. Gigi Little’s noir-soaked and delightfully surreal debut pays homage to the old-time radio classics of the forties and fifties while investigating themes of greed, sexism, and the consequences of unchecked power.
At the start of the book, we find One the Gun lying on the floor dying, just before the time loop starts up and takes him into his new adventure. That's the moment I wanted to capture with my cover. I pictured the body of Gun on that floor, but with a circle of numbers around him turning his sprawled body into the suggestion of the arms of a clock. Laura had some great ideas too, like using the image of an old fashioned radio to splurt out the title, and that sounded really fun too, but I never did get to try it because my work on my original concept just—
Oh my gosh, people, I am already getting long-winded! Pull me back!
OK, so I started by building my clock. I wanted it to reference the clock that lords over the town of Paradise City in the 1949 film The Set-Up, one of my very favorite film noirs. A fun bit of trivia about that movie, which you should definitely see, is that the clock follows the movie in real time.
I pulled the film up on YouTube and took a fuzzy screenshot as the clock swoops into view...
and then I built my numbers on top of it. I think that says a lot about my process as a designer. I took a chunk of time to build my numbers as an homage that no one will notice when I could easily have tossed down any number of different fonts that would have looked great. What is that: dedication or a tendency toward spending way too much time on something? Whatever it is, it's what makes my brain happy.
Then I needed a body. Whenever you scan the internet for images to use for design fodder, you think it should be easy to find what you need. It's never easy. All I wanted was a dead body. That doesn't sound right. It's weird to have to google the phrase dead body. I kept finding images that were kind of what I wanted but not quite what I wanted and I grabbed them and tossed them in an Illustrator file for safekeeping. I accumulated quite a collection.
In the end, I knew I'd have to Frankenstein my body together. Which is dangerous because you quickly end up with a figure that's not completely proportionally or perspectively (if that's a word) correct. But I have an extra special tool at my disposal. I shouldn't call him a tool. But it's very convenient to be married to an artist who has a keen understanding of and instinct for the human body. I knew I could draw out my body and present it to Stephen, and he'd help me fix it.
So I started building Gun's body by drawing lines in Adobe Illustrator.
Then turned my lines into solid pieces. I created the illusion of shadow and light using contrasting shapes of color, knowing that down the line I would smooth all of these layers into shading.
And then I printed my One the Gun body out and gave the printout to Stephen for review. We did three rounds with Stephen explaining what needed updating, sometimes drawing corrections directly on the paper, and me going to the computer to tweak.
He wanted the thighs shorter, one hand smaller, the head bigger... He also knows fashion through the ages down to the minutest thread and had lots to say about that. The pants needed cuffs. The hiked-up fabric at the left shoulder needed to be higher ("there were shoulder pads in those suits"). My character, even if he wasn't a fancy dresser, would never wear a brown coat with black pants. And those pants needed to be higher, higher! I had already raised the waistband from where it fell on the person in the photo I'd used as my model for Gun's legs, because I knew the waists were higher in the forties and fifties, but I hadn't raised it nearly enough.
Once I had an acceptable body, I started on the layout of the rest of the cover. I wanted it to reference the covers of those fabulous pulp detective magazines of the forties and fifties.
Lurid colors, high-contrast light and shadow, blocky, often curvy or slanty title text.
I shouldn't show off those fabulous covers before sharing my own process because I often start simple and find the cover, find what makes it really work, as I go. That happened here with my first attempt featuring a small figure of Gun lying across a very simple clock face. I did like the idea of a window with the moon pouring light down on the body, creating the circular shape of the clock.
(It felt so weird to be putting my name in there as the author, made me feel abashed, like I wasn't worthy of a novel or a book cover.)
Those floorboards are huge! The lines are also completely evenly spaced and I would want to space them out in a way that suggests that the "camera" is slightly angled. But that would happen down the line. First: the clock.
I wanted the clock to be more dynamic visually and I thought if I put a twist into it, it might also more exemplify the time travel / time loop aspect of the book. I tried various iterations.
A lot of my work was about balance. Balance of the sizes of the elements, balance of the placement. Coming in closer and zeroing in on Gun more, like in the sample with the slanty title text, worked well visually, but I really wanted that window and moon. And I liked the swirly text. It seemed to make the statement that the book would be fun, fast-moving, whimsical.
I sent samples to Laura, showed them to Stephen, got their similar feedback about needing to get in closer on Gun and bring him up higher in the frame. The placement of the blurb, too, was holding me back from doing that. Whenever I positioned things more to my liking, I was cutting down on the space for the blurb.
I kept tinkering. I moved the blurb and accepted that it would have to be a shorter snippet. The "camera" zoomed in closer. The moonlight got brighter. Gun finally got his matching brown suit.
At this point in the process, I started to get excited. Things were looking good to me. And to Laura and she thought it was time to show it to our distributor, Publishers Group West. They liked it too but one of the representatives was worried about the purple cast to the blues. They look blue to me, on my computer, but colors look different on different machines and you also can't know how they're going to print. The PGW lady read them as purple and said purple felt too soft for a noir-themed book, even a whimsical one. She suggested going bluer, or grayer, even trying green. I did some experimenting with different colorways. My illustrator file was full of different attempts in different colors.
Green looked kind of radioactive to me. And I don't know why I even bothered trying red. The color scheme Laura and I decided on was a bluer blue. And then I started to really refine things. Add details to my wall and window, play with different shades along the floor. And it was time to take the flat shapes of my figure and turn them into shading.
My way of shading things tends to be backward. I create layers in different shades of color and stack them, and then I erase the upper layers away, creating the different gradations.
When I had all my shading done, the last step was texture. A lot of the pulp magazine covers were printed using a halftone process. And luckily color halftone is one of the preset filters you can use in Illustrator and Photoshop. I used it on the cover of
City of Weird and I was really happy with the outcome. The one thing I needed to know about that filter, which I did luckily know beforehand, is that I had to create the art quite oversized in order to get the size of halftone I wanted. Had I created my cover at the trim size of the book (6" x 9"), the halftone effect, even at the smallest setting, would have been too big, too chunky. The artwork would lose much of its fine detail. I had to create my book cover at about twice the needed size in order to get the effect I wanted.
I fear/assume/know I've gotten long winded with this blog post after all, but it's hard not to. Creating a book cover is an intimate act, a sacred process. Every time I design a cover, that cover becomes, to me, a special thing. And this will be my special thing. My special thing for my special thing.
I hope it's a cover worthy of my book. I hope my book is worthy of a good cover. I hope it's all worthy of me and that I am worthy of all of it. That's what I hope.
Who Killed One the Gun? will be out October 7 of this year. For more information on me, check out my blog
here. Haha, sorry, I feel a little giddy. More actual info on me is at my website
here and more on the most fabulous Forest Avenue Press can be found
here. And writers: as of this posting Forest Avenue Press is soon to be opening up for submissions. This year's open submissions period will run from January 6 through February 9. More info is
here.
Here's a short snippet from the book
*
Prologue
At twelve midnight on the eleventh of the month, as the tower bells chime and the moon reflects ten thousand moons in the ten thousand windows of the city, chasing shadows across nine dark storefronts along the square, some certain moonbeam banks an eight-point ricochet and snaps a seven-second beeline to the six-story building on Fifth Street, where it shoots through a four-by-three-foot ground-level window of two-layer glass, straight to the basement floor where one wide circle of blood is spreading out around the body of one man.
One the Gun.
He has one minute to live.
