Evolution of the Cover: Minor Demons

I promised myself I could have a short break when I made it to 66,000 words on Minor Demons so I could post an evolution of the cover on my blog and finally reveal the finished cover for Minor Demons. The cover for Minor Demons was created by Doug Beckstead, the same artist who made the cover for Jehovah and Hades and Geek of Legend: The Elvish Screwdriver. You can find the Facebook page for his company, Original Concept Designs, here.

When I have Doug start on a cover, I usually give him a photo of the general idea of what I'm looking for and then we discuss a few specific elements that I want incorporated into it. The cool part is that I never know where exactly the drawing is going in the early stages but it always turns out great. By the time I got the third image, I knew this cover was going to be epic:

There were a few things I knew I was going to have Doug change (I requested that he try to add a skull into the hilt of the sword and that turned out looking really cool), since this is a drawing of the minor demon Shadow, but I held off and just let him go in the direction he was going in. Once he had a more complete drawing, I had him add metal gauntlets instead of bare hands.

From there, Doug started in on the computer graphics phase. He started with the face and started working his way down.

We then decided to place the drawing in a rectangle the size that the final book cover would be and insert the title. I picked the fonts for my name and the title. I also told Doug that it would be really cool if he could find a way to insert veins onto a red blade for Shadow's sword. I don't know how he did it, but he was able to pull it off.

After that, Doug finished coloring in Shadow and added him in with the text and a red fog to produce the final cover. I don't really have a "favorite part" of this cover because the whole thing looks badass and fits perfectly how I imagined Shadow the demon in my head.

As far as my action / adventure fiction goes, this is my favorite cover to date. I'm pretty sure that it should only be another week or two before I publish on Amazon and start formatting for the paperback version. Minor Demons will likely be the first book in a trilogy (I have two more books somewhat planned out in my head right now, Middle Demons and Major Demons.) Thanks for taking the time to check it out and for your patience while I finish writing the book. I know many of you want to start reading it, based on how many hits my blog got when I posted the first two chapters earlier this month.