The journey to this point has been a bit longer than I anticipated. I ran this as a competition through 99designs and was very pleased with the results. One major lesson learned for the next time will be to make the competition “private” so that artists can’t see each other’s work.
Some artists were very responsive to suggestions, some blew it off and barely read the brief. Several used the same stock images in their designs. One even took a stock image and simply slapped the title and my name on it and submitted that. Definitely minimum effort.
Jesh Art Studio came in the winner. They responded to every suggestion and submitted several ideas. It was a pleasure to work with them. Here’s their cover for the upcoming Second Edition of SPARK:
The Second Edition was necessary to get a new ISBN and new listing on Amazon. That’s next. I took this opportunity to fix some annoying typos – including the ones inserted by the previous copy editor’s “correction” from digits to words. I used 10 (2 in binary), they changed it to “ten.” That blew the entire joke: There are 10 kinds of sapients, those that understand binary and those that don’t. On the other hand, it also proved the truth of the joke when the copy editor made it read “There are ten kinds…”
What do you think of the new cover?
BTW, SPARK made it into a TikTok video! John Simons, @rinthpress, the founder of Comicpalooza, put SPARK into his first TikTok video. Check it out here.
LOVE IT