Jeffrey Overstreet shares his fears on what the cover art for Auralia’s Colors would be. “Take a stroll through the fantasy literature section of your nearest bookstore. If you’re like me, you’ll cringe. For every great book cover, it seems there are three or four that seem desperate for attention, pandering to our basest appetites. It’s like an art gallery of the cheesy, the lurid, the grotesque, the painfully derivative, and the weapons upon which people can impale themselves.”
But the artist working on the covers of his novels, Kristopher K. Orr, did a superb job.
Jim Baen, my old publisher, used to select all the cover art for the books he published, and he had definite tastes. He liked garish colors. He liked exploding spaceships. And he liked scantily clad girls. He never managed to find a way to put a spaceship on any of my books, but I got the benefit of the girls several times.
Oddly, though, I’d say the best cover I ever had at Baen was the cover for Wolf Time, which was pure drama, no sex. Didn’t have anything to do with the story, but it was a great cover.