Demon's Lexicon Cover
So....I confess to making this a rather while ago, and then forgetting about them. And then, upon re-reading DDG and realizing that I might as well share them, I offer up icons based upon a post by mistful (SRB)
"Feeling like a Diana Wynne Jones character...
So in the supermarket, I became distracted by a jar of marmalade. The little orange strands in it suddenly looked rather like fish to me, and I tilted the jar of marmalade towards the light, thinking 'the fish would need special jelly-absorbing gills' when it occurred to me that nobody who thinks about fish living in marmalade will ever turn out to be a Secret Genius.
... It was a blow to me, I will confess. But I'm recovering. "
And then also,
"And The Demon's Lexicon cover is changing from hardcover to paperback. I am most interested to hear your thoughts on what it may be like!"
so...I made the cover for a 4 x 6 (I measured a couple paperbacks) based off of my comment
"I would definitely vote for an object cover...and maybe an artsy drawn one instead of the plague of photoshopped ones bookstores seem to be beset with? Ah, but that's just me being rather snooty. Although, perhaps my opinions should be disregarded? I also happen to think that a cover of a baby bat perched on a blueberry scone would be fantastic and would make me endlessly happy."
I'm not totally sure I like the background....I originally had an absolutely plain black background, but there seemed to be too much of a difference between the title and the cover.
The noun's noun is a rather typical title for a YA series, or at least it seems to me to have a rather standard format....so nothing homgwow, what the hell there.
Then we have Demon, which is a rather common term that leads to some natural conclusions. That there is magic, or at least some equivalent, that this is fantasy, and could possibly be all Darky Spooky books with woe and and angst. *yawn* Nothing new, but well.. it could be good!
But then.... we have Lexicon which is:
a)not a common word
b)not a really common word in title (Searches in my local library for "demon" as the key word turned up 7 pages of results, and I rather started scrolling really fast after page 3. "lexicon" popped up with TDL as the second result, with a pretty picture of the cover. I also suspect it was the only fiction book that showed up, not confirmed after I stopped scrolling through the miscellaneous spanish results. There were a total of two pages.)
b) Dictionary.com defines lexicon thusly
1. a wordbook or dictionary, esp. of Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. 2. the vocabulary of a particular language, field, social class, person, etc. 3. inventory or record: unparalleled in the lexicon of human relations. 4. Linguistics. a. the total inventory of morphemes in a given language. b. the inventory of base morphemes plus their combinations with derivational morphemes.
And any sufficiently book-y person suddenly goes "Oooooh....." Lexicon! words! and...the Demon's Lexicon?!
Now I am fascinated. I am not thinking "book about love and bodice rippers, and oh, sexy sexy demons" I am thinking "This here is an interesting book that is not going to be all straight forward. Maychance there will be intellectuals with a side helping of demons? Perhaps there will be demons who are intellectuals? Perhaps there will be,...oh, I don't know let me read the book!!"
It is an intriguing title. Intriguing titles are good. They make people read the summaries on the backs of books. And then you read the book and go "NOM YUMMEH BOOK IS YUMMEH".
So, yeah, to return to my original point, intriguing titles require intriguing covers. Now, the first cover was the whole face cover Woe angst and pouty lips, with crows and stuff, appealing to the whole that whatever crowd. I absolutely adore the Finnish cover (which, failing to find a large copy of the image, I will like you to SRB's official webpage. It will be the third cover that shows up. The German and Japanese covers are rather fantastic as well, but they are not object covers, and thus do not count.
So, based off of the lovely conversation between Nick and Mae involving blueberry scones and bats...I tried to make a cover which both captured the very real danger and death-combat-and-demons part of the book with the absolutely fantastically quirky humor of the book. I was originally doing this in pencil on a piece of paper fitted to one of my other paperbacks when I realized a) I cannot draw bats b) I cannot draw blueberry scones and c) I can only do about two fonts via handwriting, and neither of them were appropriate.
For general Maya-love, support of the wonderfully insane, or just for love of marmalade fish: a steaming hot blueberry scone with a baby bat.
"Feeling like a Diana Wynne Jones character...
So in the supermarket, I became distracted by a jar of marmalade. The little orange strands in it suddenly looked rather like fish to me, and I tilted the jar of marmalade towards the light, thinking 'the fish would need special jelly-absorbing gills' when it occurred to me that nobody who thinks about fish living in marmalade will ever turn out to be a Secret Genius.
... It was a blow to me, I will confess. But I'm recovering. "
And then also,
"And The Demon's Lexicon cover is changing from hardcover to paperback. I am most interested to hear your thoughts on what it may be like!"
so...I made the cover for a 4 x 6 (I measured a couple paperbacks) based off of my comment
"I would definitely vote for an object cover...and maybe an artsy drawn one instead of the plague of photoshopped ones bookstores seem to be beset with? Ah, but that's just me being rather snooty. Although, perhaps my opinions should be disregarded? I also happen to think that a cover of a baby bat perched on a blueberry scone would be fantastic and would make me endlessly happy."
I'm not totally sure I like the background....I originally had an absolutely plain black background, but there seemed to be too much of a difference between the title and the cover.
The noun's noun is a rather typical title for a YA series, or at least it seems to me to have a rather standard format....so nothing homgwow, what the hell there.
Then we have Demon, which is a rather common term that leads to some natural conclusions. That there is magic, or at least some equivalent, that this is fantasy, and could possibly be all Darky Spooky books with woe and and angst. *yawn* Nothing new, but well.. it could be good!
But then.... we have Lexicon which is:
a)not a common word
b)not a really common word in title (Searches in my local library for "demon" as the key word turned up 7 pages of results, and I rather started scrolling really fast after page 3. "lexicon" popped up with TDL as the second result, with a pretty picture of the cover. I also suspect it was the only fiction book that showed up, not confirmed after I stopped scrolling through the miscellaneous spanish results. There were a total of two pages.)
b) Dictionary.com defines lexicon thusly
1. a wordbook or dictionary, esp. of Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. 2. the vocabulary of a particular language, field, social class, person, etc. 3. inventory or record: unparalleled in the lexicon of human relations. 4. Linguistics. a. the total inventory of morphemes in a given language. b. the inventory of base morphemes plus their combinations with derivational morphemes.
And any sufficiently book-y person suddenly goes "Oooooh....." Lexicon! words! and...the Demon's Lexicon?!
Now I am fascinated. I am not thinking "book about love and bodice rippers, and oh, sexy sexy demons" I am thinking "This here is an interesting book that is not going to be all straight forward. Maychance there will be intellectuals with a side helping of demons? Perhaps there will be demons who are intellectuals? Perhaps there will be,...oh, I don't know let me read the book!!"
It is an intriguing title. Intriguing titles are good. They make people read the summaries on the backs of books. And then you read the book and go "NOM YUMMEH BOOK IS YUMMEH".
So, yeah, to return to my original point, intriguing titles require intriguing covers. Now, the first cover was the whole face cover Woe angst and pouty lips, with crows and stuff, appealing to the whole that whatever crowd. I absolutely adore the Finnish cover (which, failing to find a large copy of the image, I will like you to SRB's official webpage. It will be the third cover that shows up. The German and Japanese covers are rather fantastic as well, but they are not object covers, and thus do not count.
So, based off of the lovely conversation between Nick and Mae involving blueberry scones and bats...I tried to make a cover which both captured the very real danger and death-combat-and-demons part of the book with the absolutely fantastically quirky humor of the book. I was originally doing this in pencil on a piece of paper fitted to one of my other paperbacks when I realized a) I cannot draw bats b) I cannot draw blueberry scones and c) I can only do about two fonts via handwriting, and neither of them were appropriate.
For general Maya-love, support of the wonderfully insane, or just for love of marmalade fish: a steaming hot blueberry scone with a baby bat.