Lawrence Mann is doing the cover to my first novel. 

He recently did a live session on it – which I thought I would share. You can find it here: Novel Cover Session

There are so many pieces of the process that are interesting to me. From just how quickly Lawrence was able to sketch up changes as we talked through what we were trying to achieve to how an initial draft represents what it’s going to become.

On the latter, when I first saw the draft I liked it but was unsure how to comment. I discovered that because I was completely ignorant of the design process I really had no benchmark for where in his journey Lawrence was in creating the cover. I also discovered that I didn’t have the tools I felt I needed to review his work and make sensible comments.

Fortunately Lawrence was a great help (obviously having held the hand of more than one clueless author before). He talked me through his own thinking, we added a few more pins to the pinterest board and generally figured out how the image would mature into the final cover.

One of the most important things I learned was that the draft was very different to the final product. That initial sketch which you can see in the youtube video isn’t simply an unfinished version of the final – it is a concept, a prediction. It is as different to the final image as you were from your four year old self. This was reassuring because I couldn’t initially see how it would get to what I had in my head.

With an hours discussion together with lots of off the cuff sketching I understood a lot more, both about how the final product would look but also about what I wanted. I think we came to a good end and the next step will be the image itself – about which I’m very excited.