Nine Years Of Demonsouled Covers

I’ve been self-publishing for nine years now, and while I haven’t changed the cover image for DEMONSOULED every year, I’ve come close! So I thought it would be amusing to take a jaunt down memory lane and look at the old covers.

This was my first one from 2011, back when I didn’t know any cover designers and couldn’t afford stock photos. Everything from before 1924 is public domain in the US in terms of copyright, so I used a lot of old pictures and paintings for cover art at first. (This was/is fairly common in traditional publishing, which used a lot of public domain art for book covers.) This painting was by John William Waterhouse:

Later I found another artist named Viktor Vasnetsov, and I used one of his paintings for the cover. (This became an in-joke in CLOAK OF DRAGONS when Nadia sees this painting while investigating Max Sarkany’s murder, and is mildly freaked out by it):

Next, I discovered stock photos! (Another traditional source of cover images for traditional publishing.) This was the first cover for DEMONSOULED made from stock photos – I think this was from 2012 or so:

Then in 2013, I started working with Clarissa Yeo for cover designs, and this is the excellent cover she made for DEMONSOULED:

In 2015, I tried putting DEMONSOULED into Kindle Unlimited for the first time, which meant a new cover assembled from stock photos:

In 2017, I switched to a new stock photo for the cover of DEMONSOUleD, and kept that one for a couple of years:

Finally, in 2020 for DEMONSOULED’s latest run in Kindle Unlimited, I made a new cover with 3d rendering software:

So, seven covers in nine years! But that’s one of the nice things about self-publishing – you can keep changing things and trying new things.

-JM