(In honor of this I’m doing a little contest, details at the end.)
So…let’s hop in the time machine, shall we? All the way back to September of 2007. I’d sold the second romance novel I ever wrote (after extensive edits and cleaning up and all of that stuff), a medieval non-erotic romance called The Black Dragon, to an epublisher called Triskelion Publishing, which later went belly-up. Thankfully I’d gotten my rights back and sold them to Cerridwen Press, Ellora’s Cave’s non-erotic imprint, before that happened, but I’m going to talk about that a bit more near the end of the post.
The Black Dragon was a big deal to me. It was, at the time, my favorite thing I’d written, in large part because when I wrote it I was thinking of all those great “old-school” style romances I read as a kid. I wanted to do an homage to them, a sort of throwback type of story. So it was written in a specific voice and with, I hoped, a specific sort of feel. I was inordinately fond of the story, and still am, to be honest, because I think I managed to at least somewhat capture that feeling I remembered from those old-school romances.
And of course I wanted a cover that sort of reflected that feeling, but I knew Triskelion’s cover art was…well…not always great. So I asked for a fairly plain cover, a sword of a field of red silk, maybe with a dragon shadow over it? Or failing that the H/h on the parapets of a castle at sunset, which was kind of an important scene in the book.
Below is what I got. I literally burst into tears when I saw it. My lovely book, stuck with that. I emailed and begged for a different model, or pose, or something, anything, to no avail. I was so horrified that when I posted it on my blog, the only positive thing I could say was that I liked the font they used for the title. It was truly nightmarish.
Anyway. The other day some of my fellow Reluctant Adults and I were talking about covers, and some of the covers we’d had throughout our careers, and linking to them and showing them. I happened to toss in the cover triskelion gave The Black Dragon, and Mario Acevedo–that scamp!–mentioned how much better it might be if Mark Henry’s face was on it rather than the original model.
This is the original cover (Cerridwen, of course, gave it a new cover, which I adored, and will post at the end as well):
