Cover Building!

Happy Saturday evening to you. 

I'm writing this late today since I spent a good number of hours out in the garden, weeding my vegetable beds and side garden. It was only 6 Deg. Centigrade, a bit cloudy with no rain, and no snow. It was what I call comfortable fleece weather. 

I'm now back to thinking about writing tasks, and will focus on what I did when initially engaging a professional cover designer to create my covers for the eBook and wraparound paperback versions of Before Beltane, my recently published paperback, and my still-in-Pre-order eBook. 

The cover for Before Beltane, a Prequel to my Celtic Fervour Series, needed to be compatible with the five other book covers. On those there is something Celtic, all have something Roman, and they all have a figure which is male or female and relevant to the book content. 

Before Beltane is all about the lives of Lorcan of Garrigill and Nara of Tarras BEFORE they meet in Book 1, The Beltane Choice. Therefore, I felt that the cover for the Prequel, Before Beltane, needed to give a hint of both of the main protagonists. It also needed to convey the threat of the imminent Roman legionary invasion. 

The Beltane Choice (#1) cover features Nara in a turbulent Roman attack setting. I wanted Before Beltane to also have a Roman element and 'photos' of Lorcan and Nara. I trawled the usual image licensing sites to find faces that grabbed me and said YES! that is Lorcan, and YES! that is Nara. I forwarded my ideas to Laurence Patterson (Darkstroke) and he did the tricky bits of acquiring relevant images and merged the cover together. 

I absolutely adore what he has done. Don't you? 

You can get a paperback copy of Before Beltane HERE or Pre-order an eBook copy HERE. 

Wishing you happy Reading.

Slàinte!