I made a decision recently not to make my own cover for my next novel but to pay Klaus the artist doing the new Harvey Duckman covers to do one for me. There are serval reasons for this, one of which this novel is being released as part of the Harvey Duckman stable, so I want the cover art work to be reflective of this. Getting Klaus to do the cover just makes sense in this case

The reason the novel is part of the Harvey Duckman stable is because the original short story that seeded this novel was written for one of the original Harvey Anthologies. That and I like the idea of it been part of a larger body of work. Mine is not the only novel that will be coming out under the Harvey banner next year, it probably will not even be the first, as Kate Baucherel is currently finishing her ‘Finch’ novel*. A pangalactic travel log, written by an avian backpacker of as yet undetermined sex as they ‘have not got their adult feathers yet’ Who is following much the same route their grand mother when she was a young avian. If it wasn’t for the pirates, kidnappings and occasional octopus barman… Finch also originally started out as a short story in the original Harvey run.

*my entire contribution to the Finch Ministries were the words ‘octopus catapult’ , I am ridiculously proud of this fact…

But anyway, back to the Lucifer mandrake cover. Up until now I have never had someone else do a cover for one of my books. So before going to Klaus for the art work I wanted to do a few mock up a few cover options of my own. Sound boarding ideas in effect. Of course, in this abhorrent age, there is an easy way to do this, but I don’t, won’t , and never will, use AI for anything to do with art. I would rather nail my scrotum to a table than use AI in fact. So instead I went on to Canva, with a large rum in hand, and played around with ideas the same way I always do. Which is far more creative than using AI , and involves rum.

So anyway, this is not a cover reveal… The final cover, and indeed possibly title as this is just the working title, will undoubtedly be different, probably very different. But I do kind of like the way it turned out anyway, so thought I would share it…

Also, making covers is something of a traditional piece of procrastination when I am on the last couple of chapters of a novel, and I need to procrastinate…

Opinions of the cover are most certainly welcome btw…