cover art – Science Fiction Worlds of Jeffrey A. Carver

24 Oct 2024

Spiffy New Editions for The Rapture Effect

posted in: audiobooks, cover art, my books, new editions | 0

I’ve been working on a new print edition of The Rapture Effect—the first print release since the original Tor publication. Following The Infinity Link, The Rapture Effect was my second long novel, about an interstellar war being waged by an AI, which now wants to find a way to stop it. The new print version is nearly ready, along with a reformatted ebook edition. Even better, principal recording has wrapped on a new audiobook—narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. This should really rev your engines. The old audiobook currently in the Audible store is not at all what it should have been, and it will soon be going away. The new version will get wide distribution.

To celebrate all this, I hereby present a brand-new cover*, with wonderful graphics magic by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff. She found a way to weave a whole new fabric from a collection of images I sent her way. I hope you like it. Yes, this is a cover reveal!

All this should be breaking free in the next few weeks. Check back for updates.

*BTW, I love the old cover, with art by David Mattingly. But it’s had a good, long run, and its sales mojo has sort of run out of steam. It will be retired with honors.

30 Sep 2020

New Look for Eternity’s End Ebook!

posted in: cover art, ebooks, Eternity's End, my books, Star Rigger Universe | 2

Back some years ago, when Tor published the first edition of my Star Rigger novel Eternity’s End, they commissioned cover art from Stephen Youll, one of the leading artists in the SF field. Stephen had a great vision for the book, and the Tor cover looked like this:

Later, when I brought out my own ebook edition, I had a much smaller budget. I bought some stock art I liked and enlisted writer/artist Pat Ryan to put it all together for me. I was quite pleased with the result, which looked like this:

I used that cover for many years, and it served me well. But I never forgot the original, which I loved for the way it popped off the page, and also actually reflected the story inside. As I started to think about a new paper edition of the book, I also thought about that painting. I got in touch with the artist, and Stephen was excited at the chance to have the art used again. He cut me a deal, and I proudly took a high-res jpg of the art to Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, who’s been doing my cover layouts. She outdid herself in the type design and gave me this new ebook and print book cover, and this week I have released it into world! (Click on it to see it full size.)

And if you’d like to see the full, glorious, wraparound art, without any text, here it is (click image to biggify).

Sometimes I really love my job.

23 May 2019

Cover “Reveal” for The Reefs of Time!

posted in: cover art, The Chaos Chronicles, The Reefs of Time | 1

I’ve shown you pieces, I’ve shown you snippets, I’ve teased you. (Okay, if you’ve gone to the actual book page, or Amazon or something, I’ve shown you the cover. Look, I’m a novelist, not a publicist.) But now for the first time here, in glorious full size, is the cover for The Reefs of Time!

Reefs of Time cover — Art by Chris Howard, design by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

I think it’s pretty cool, and I hope you do, too. The artist, Chris Howard, was once a student in a writing workshop Craig Gardner and I ran, and now he’s not only an accomplished writer, but an accomplished artist, also. He did the covers for The Infinite Sea and Seas of Ernathe, as well. Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff has done the type for the majority of my ebooks.

2 Dec 2014

The Infinite Sea Goes Live at BVC, and Gets a New Look, Besides

posted in: Book View Cafe, cover art, ebooks, my books, The Chaos Chronicles | 0

My third Chaos book, The Infinite Sea, has been out as an ebook for quite a while, but I’ve been waiting to put it up at Book View Café until I could get a new cover designed for it. I’ve been wanting a new cover for a long time, but I couldn’t find the right art. (On my budget, the art on my books usually comes from stock art web sites, sometimes with significant massaging, or combining of images, by whoever does the design work for me. On my more recent books, that design work has been expertly done by my fellow BVC writer, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff. Sometimes I can use the original art from the print edition, with permission of the artist, and that’s cool, when it happens.) But in this case, I just couldn’t find what I wanted: an undersea tableau on an alien world.

Enter Chris Howard, writer and artist, whom I first met when he enrolled in the Ultimate Science Fiction Writing Workshop that I’ve run from time to time with my friend Craig Shaw Gardner. Chris is a gifted writer. It turns out he’s also a terrifically talented artist. Take a look at his website, saltwaterwitch.com, and tell me he’s not. I commissioned a piece of original art from Chris, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the results.

The Infinite Sea goes on sale today at Book View Café in its new clothes:

Original artwork (c) by Chris Howard

For those who like history, here’s what the future looked like in print from Tor Books, and also its previous ebook cover, which I created myself, using Chaoscope, a chaos image generator. I liked the Tor cover a lot, and I liked the chaos image, though my hand-made cover had a, well, hand-made look to it. I’m really psyched to be moving on to the new image, from Chris Howard (type design by Maya). It will replace the versions currently in all the other stores, as well.

And these last two covers will retire, with honor.