The SILENT ORDER cover journey

The SILENT ORDER series is now five years old and eleven books long, and in that time I’ve gone through five major iterations of the cover design.

I thought it would be interesting to go through those five iterations and explain my thinking behind each one.

The first version was in 2017 when the series came out. I thought long and hard about what I wanted, and I made the covers in GIMP, settling for the “spaceship flying towards planet” look. I couldn’t find a font I liked for free, so I licensed the font Gunrunner from designer Daniel Zadorozny. I liked the font, but in retrospect, it wasn’t the greatest choice, since it was hard to read in thumbnail. In fact, the original title of SILENT ORDER book seven was going to be MORPH HAND, but that looked bad with that particular font, so I changed it to MASTER HAND. These were all right to begin with, but I wanted something better.

2018 rolled around, and I thought it was time for a cover refresh. Maybe covers with figures on them instead of spaceships? And maybe something that had more of a “secret agent” vibe to it, since the Silent Order is an intelligence agency? For a while, there was a trend in cover design to have figures on covers with the heads out of frame. This was part of the problem of finding decent stock photos. For example, if you wanted to have the same character image on the front cover, you either needed a whole sequence of stock photos of the same character in different poses, or accept that you would have to use a different sequence of stock photos. Having the heads out of frame was a way around it. (The original CLOAK GAMES covers were like that as well.) This sort of worked for a while, but eventually people turned against it, and the conventions for science fiction books really require planets and spaceships.

I didn’t think the 2018 covers worked really well, so I decided to switch back to spaceships and planets. Rather than trying to assemble them myself in GIMP, I looked for good stock scenes on Dreamstime and used those. A digital artist named Luca Oleastri had (and still has) a bunch of good SF scenes on Dreamstime, so I picked several promising ones from his Dreamstime portfolio and used those for the 2019 covers for SILENT ORDER.

Then, of course, we arrived at 2020, the Year Of The Rona. Like many people, I found myself with more free time than I had previously, and I thought the time had come to use some of that free time to upskill. I had become frustrated with the limitations of GIMP and my own limitations of knowledge in using the program, and I also felt the I had reached the limits of what I could teach myself. It was time to take a class! I took Dean Samed’s Neostock Photoshop course and also read the official Adobe 2020 Photoshop guide, and I started using Photoshop for the first time. I also started experimenting with DAZ 3d modeling, which is basically like having your own stock photo factory once you’ve figured it out. The combination led to a quantum leap forward in terms of what I was able to do with graphics and cover design.

So at the end of 2021, I decided to redo the SILENT ORDER covers yet again! This time I would use a combination of DAZ figures and space backgrounds. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, especially the covers for FIRE HAND, MASTER HAND, and ROYAL HAND. That said, as with the 2018 covers, I don’t think I quite hit the genre expectations for science fiction spaceships. As the comic strip said, a lot of SF readers were looking for “planets, and spaceships, in close proximity!” So the covers didn’t convey the genre to the extent that I wanted.

When 2022 rolled around, before SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND came out, I decided to redo the covers once more! This time I leaned in heavily with the “planet and spaceship” theme, and it was actually quite a bit easier to do it in Photoshop than it was in GIMP. It was worth the effort, since SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND sold as many copies in 11 days as ROYAL HAND did in 30. (Thanks for reading, everyone!)

Have I learned anything? Yes, this. A truth: if you want to get better at something, you must first accept being bad at it for some time. 🙂

-JM