A Rose by Any Other Name

An interesting post, via Colleen Lindsay, about what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to choosing the title of a book. Also some interesting stuff about cover art.

I thought now would be a good time to repost the original artwork for my novel, Conundrum. This is the art created from my cover art suggestion. Ultimately, this piece was nixed in favor of a more conservative look, but I agree with the artist, Matt Stawicki, that this version is considerably better:

Compare here to the published version. It's much more tame.

Matt also did the artwork for Dark Thane; notice the title of this piece - Kingdom of the Dead, which was my original title for Dark Thane.

Of course, Mark Zug did a fantastic job portraying Cael for the cover of Thieves' Guild. Dragonlance covers are often ordered before the novel is finished being written. Such was the case with both Dark Thane and Thieves' Guild. When my Guild novel was originally listed on Amazon. com, I was still only about half finished writing the novel. This was the original cover:

If you are familiar with Dragonlance and the time period in which Thieves' Guild takes place, you might notice something odd in the cityscape of Palanthas - the phallic image of the Tower of High Sorcery. It's not supposed to be there. In fact, it's been missing from the skyline for almost forty years. As soon as I saw the cover listed on Amazon, I contacted the publishers to let them know. The cover was modified to this:

Also of interest is Cael's staff. It's a cane. In my draft to that point, he was carrying a staff. Rather than ask them to revamp the cover to accomodate a staff, I changed the novel and made his weapon a cane that was magically able to extend and retract, from staff to cane, and then, of course, to sword. So that little piece of the novel was actually born from the cover art.