The 5 Stages of a Book Cover for Quinn and the Quiet, Quiet

Coming September/2019, Dundurn Press

A book cover is an amazing thing: salesperson, storyteller, harbinger of the delights to come inside ... plus, in the case of the Weird Stories Gone Wrong covers, a work of art.

But how does a book cover come to be? 

Here's the cover for Quinn and the Quiet, Quiet, book six in the award-winning, middle-grade horror series. The amazing illustrator is Shawna Daigle, who has done all six beautiful covers, and by my count, a whopping 46 inside illustrations for the series in total. They are all works of art.

Together, Shawna and I usually have a pretty strong idea which moment in the story we want on the cover, most often it's the inciting incident (but not always). 

Below is my ludicrously rough first drawing for this cover (never said I was an artist, brace yourself), a starting point for Shawna, and Shawna's take-away from it: 

First roughs for the cover of Quinn and the Quiet, Quiet. Author's version and Artist's.

That's the very beginning of the cover, first step. I don't usually do a rough for the cover, but in this case I did. Note, Shawna does not require the use of callouts to make it plain what she's drawing. 😊 Her snow LOOKS like snow, for instance. Mine just says the word "snow."

Next step, the editor, illustrator and author discuss finer points of the illustration. This is the stage to make any BIG changes (not after it's inked). In this case, we settled on colder weather clothes since the story takes place on a frozen distant planet, and added a girl with braids (to highlight a main character). The next stage of illustration from Shawna, incorporates these changes and is painted:

Shawna Daigle, the cover for Quinn and the Quiet, Quiet, step two: painted.

After this step was approved, then Shawna built the beautiful final cover in Adobe Photoshop. Here it is, digitized:

Shawna Daigle, final art for the cover of Quinn and the Quiet, Quiet.

I often think this stage in the cover design is so beautiful, that we should make posters and raffle them off to readers. In fact, I think we'll do that for the launch of this book next fall! Note to self ...

AND, finally, the art above is turned into a cover by the publisher, Dundurn Press. There are a lot more than just 5 steps involved in the creation of a piece of art like this, and countless hours spent by Shawna in the process, but these are the broad, main steps. We've had such fun with this series which began in 2014, and in the coming months stay tuned for posts about the books, process, writing and more. But for now, take a look at all of Shawna's incredible covers:

All six covers of the Weird Stories Gone Wrong series, 2014-2019,
by Philippa Dowding (Author) and Shawna Daigle (Illustrator)

More About Weird Stories Gone Wrong on this Blog.