Fennick Press · 2023
Reissue covers for a cult fantasy trilogy
Three covers, spines and endpapers for a twentieth-anniversary reissue, painted in gouache and finished with a single foil to tie the series together on the shelf.
- Client
- Fennick Press
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Cover illustrator
- Duration
- 12 weeks
- Services
- Book cover illustration
- Hand lettering
- Series design
The problem
Fennick Press was reissuing a fantasy trilogy that had a devoted readership and three mismatched original covers, each painted by a different artist in a different decade. Fans had strong opinions, and the publisher was nervous: the reissue needed to welcome new readers without making longtime fans feel the books had been turned into something generic.
Each cover had to work as a full-size hardback jacket, a paperback a year later, and a thumbnail on an online store at around 160 pixels wide. The production budget allowed full color plus one gold foil per cover. The spines had to form a single continuous image when the three books sat together, and the sales conference deadline was fixed at twelve weeks.
Process
- I
Reading and thumbnails
I read all three books and filled a notebook with objects, places and recurring images, then drew twenty-four cover thumbnails at thumbnail size, deliberately small. Anything that failed at the size of a postage stamp was cut. The editor and I settled on one object per book, the lantern, the key and the boat, framed by a shared border.
- II
Color scripts across the set
I painted small color scripts of all three covers side by side so the series moved from dusk violet to night blue to dawn amber, mirroring the story. The combined spine image, a river running across all three books, was planned at this stage so each spine still made sense alone and the foil line continued across the joins.
- III
Gouache finals and foil plates
Finals were painted in gouache on hot-press board at 150 percent of trim, scanned and color-corrected against the printer's proofs. I drew the foil elements, border and title lettering, as separate one-bit artwork at 2400 dpi so the foil stamp held fine detail. Endpapers reused the river as a two-color pattern to keep costs within budget.
Selected images
Readers who'd owned the originals for twenty years bought the reissue anyway. That doesn't happen because of marketing. It happens because the covers felt like they'd read the books.
Outcome
The reissued hardbacks sold out their first run of 8,000 in six weeks and went back to press before the paperbacks were scheduled. Booksellers built table displays around the joined spines, and fan forums, which had been braced for disappointment, mostly argued about which of the three covers was best.
- 8,000
- first run sold out
- 6 wks
- from launch to reprint
- 1
- gold foil per cover
Keep reading
All work