Cover Reveal!

I'm so excited by this. I said I was going to wait and I at least waited until reaching the halfway point of writing the second book. I love unveiling the covers of books to come, and this was hard to come by.

I searched through premade covers to find one similar to what I had in mind and was pleasantly surprised by what is the Enlightenment cover below. It happened to work out that the designer had more images with the same model that could be made into covers for the other two books. Hooray for consistency!

The challenge with this is that on the fictional world of Ahlias, the races have pretty well blended together so that most citizens have mixed characteristics, although the extremes of skin color do happen. The main character is one of the darker complexioned individuals of the world. Finding a cover with a model with the right attitude, age, and color was a challenge, but I knew the right one when I saw it. I lucked out.

As many know, book covers do tend to be whitewashed. That's such a shame, because, as Guardians of the Galaxy demonstrated with pink, blue, green, yellow, and even crystalline beings and more, we can use whatever color pallet that we choose. Finding a model to represent that can be hard, unless one is willing to hire an artist that can create something from scratch or is willing to rewrite their character, which just isn't an option in my mind.

The Luriel Cycle needed a style more in line with contemporary/urban fantasy, which is to use live models. Besides, I wanted a real person for these. She worked out nicely. Thank you, whoever you are who posed for the stock photos used in these covers. We writers appreciate your willingness to share yourself with the world to represent our fictional characters!

Now, I would like to reveal The Luriel Cycle covers:

And thank you to Angela of Covered Creatively for the artistic talent and cooperation in setting up the series covers to fit the stories written and planned!