One of the fun parts about self-publishing your own book is making your own cover art! I’ve dabbled in artsy stuff my whole life and my books are a fun way to go from amateur to semi-pro artist once in a while. The Full Coverage cover art changed pretty dramatically over the 6 months I was working on it. Below you can see a gallery of the evolution of the cover and if you click on each thumbnail you’ll see more info about each one. Enjoy!

2015-10-31: My first of three hand drawn concept covers that I used for my first beta test. The First Aid cross and cheeseburger wound up coming back.

2015-10-31: Initially I was trying to describe events in the book with icons, but these are really hard to see as thumbnails.

2015-10-31: The “Insurance Forms” cover that I originally though would be what I was going for. It makes things really busy though and it doesn’t show up well as a thumbnail.

2015-11-03: My first attempt at using Inkscape to make the cover. The cheeseburgers are in, but the font is still just standard built in windows fonts.

2015-11-03: The red color scheme finally appears! Still looks like a Powerpoint deck with those standard fonts though.

2015-11-03: My first attempt at customized text and the First Aid cross makes a comeback. Due to my bad splicing skills in Inkscape the E is cut off, but this is still an early draft.

2015-11-03: Trying out letterbox view on a book cover? My copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress does this, but it doesn’t really work here.

2015-11-03: Letterboxing gone, final tagline on top.

2015-11-03: The blood splatter is added! Things are starting to come together.

2015-11-03: I actually kinda like this inverted color look. Maybe I’ll bring it back for a special edition or Full Coverage 5: Blood on the Snow.

2016-05-14: I figure out the “extrude” tool in Inkscape and come up with suitably dramatic text for my cover. Now you can read it as a thumbnail. This is also where I switched from a clip art cheesburger to my own double decker creation.

2016-05-14: Initial blood splatter is added. You can see that it’s the same as what is used on the cross.

2016-05-16: I find a splatter font and some other blood splatter brushes and the final blood pattern is added.

2017-03-19: I remove the “About Health Insurance” subtext to try and not scare people off from reading the book. This is the final cover!