Spire Ablaze: Covers and Design

Lo, I have reached the top of the mountain, and from these dizzying heights Spire Ablaze is ready to be unleashed upon the world at large! This past week has been filled with the scramble of formatting, graphic design, and final playtesting. I find this portion of the publication process refreshing in as many ways as it is nerve-racking: It's a different way to vent my creative energies than writing, but it's also very important that everything goes perfectly! Formatting and design give potential readers a first impression, and in a growing pool of gamebook competition, I want my presentation to be top notch!

The eminently talented Tony Hough (Fighting Fantasy, Warhammer) provided me with a gorgeous digital painting to work with for the cover as you'll see below. I decided to go a bit out of my comfort zone on the design, especially on the back cover for this one. My designing tends to trend toward darker things: blacks and grays. Lately, as the Internet gets brighter and brighter, I've found that kicking old habits to the curb and using bright colors can really let the whole thing breathe. Besides, the cover art for book 3 is downright black, so Spire was my chance to let the light shine in!

Preliminary Spire Ablaze jacket

This one went through quite a few revisions, many of which tried to capitalize on the oranges and yellows of the fire, even to the point of setting the title itself ablaze. Over-all it just came out too harsh and garish no matter how it was done, so I decided on a light blue to fit in with Tony's sweeping sky and cloudscape. The mighty mutant king was enlarged and set in the bottom left, the clouds behind his stone throne weaving their way up into a blue-white gradient for the introductory text to rest upon.

I settled on the whipmaster's head for the spine. Something about his aloof and disapproving stare and tattooed head just works perfectly for me. I decided to feature headshots on the spines of all the Road Less Traveled books back on Westward which sported Tony's bright blue mutant staring out at readers from the spine. I also decided to add the Greek Winter logo which was conspicuously absent from Book 1. Ah well, live and learn eh?

Spire Ablaze will be shipping to my Kickstarter backers in October and will be available for purchase on Amazon and greekwinter.com in November! I'm also working on an Android version which should arrive on the Google Play store sometime in November or December as well!