Recovering the Postal Marines

There are five pillars to being a successful writer: cover, description, storytelling, promotion, productivity. Of these pillars, a lot of authors focus on storytelling…at least in the beginning. Eventually, the good ones learn to focus on all five. The good thing is authors do not need to master all of them.

Enter my book covers. Over the past 12 years, Bellicose has had several covers. The first was one that I made myself. The layout concept was from a non-fiction book I thought was interesting. You can see it in the image below at the bottom. It comprised two black stripes and a picture of what appears to be a stoned youth. Fortunately, that cover never quite saw the light of day.

Three Bellicose Cover in Time

About a decade ago, I went to 99 Designs and found who I thought was going to be a rock-solid cover artist. We did four covers together for each of my first four (as yet still unfinished) novels. You see that cover to the left on the image. Time and priorities led us to drift apart.

Fast forward to 2021. I’m at the 20 Books to 50K Vegas conference. I happen upon Jake, who had some cool cover art. He was super nice, and we hit it off. Since then, we’ve completed two covers together. The first for Bellicose, which you see to the right in the image. Jake has put together two covers that inspire me to improve my writing and plod to finish the series.