Behold!
This is officially the new ebook cover for Star Wanderers. I’ve uploaded it to all platforms, though I haven’t updated the epub files yet. I’ll also update the paperbacks as soon as I have a chance, though that may take a while, especially with the new baby.
This image was AI generated using Stable Diffusion. It went through a lot of iterations, and can probably use some improvement, but this is the best I can do with the skills I currently have. Maybe a couple of years from now, after I’ve mastered the technology, I’ll make a new cover for this title. But I think this one is good enough to keep for a while.
Just for fun, here are some of the old covers:
The original novel cover, which this latest one has replaced.
The second omnibus cover, from the novella series. The cover itself is by Libbie Grant, though the planet itself is a screenshot I took from Celestia.
The art from the complete series omnibus, which replaced the first two omnibuses and was the immediate precursor to the novelization itself.
The original cover for the first omnibus. The art is by Ina Wong, who also did the current cover art for The Sword Keeper.
This is the original art for the second omnibus, by Derek Murphy.
This is my personal favorite from the art by Libbie Grant. She did all eight novellas and both ominbus editions in this style.
This is the second cover for the original novelette. Derek saw my crappy self-made cover and offered to make me this one for free, so that he could showcase both of them in a before-and-after post on his blog. It worked out really well!
And this is the original ebook cover art for the first novelette that started it all. I had just launched Desert Stars, after draining my bank account to publish it since the kickstarter had failed (This was back in 2011, and I had no idea how to run a kickstarter—or how to profitably publish a book, for that matter). Since I didn’t want to spend another $900 to publish a full-length novel to the sound of crickets, I decided to turn my current WIP into a novella series, put them all out on a shoestring budget, and reinvest whatever money they earned into better editing and cover art.
The image is taken from NASA and is totally in the public domain, and I think the font is too, or at least it’s freeware of some kind. I put it together over the summer, when I was home from teaching English overseas in the Republic of Georgia. For this one, I think I used my desktop, but most of the other ones in this style were done on my tiny ASUS netbook with a screen the size of a postcard, in an old farmhouse in a tiny Georgian village at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, which had no heating aside from the woodburning stove downstairs. The power would also frequently go out for hours at a time.
I wrote a bunch of the original novellas out there, in that tiny little Georgian village. And now, they’re all combined into one novel, which I’m turning into a trilogy right now! Just need to finish revising the second book, hopefully before that new baby comes. I should probably stop procrastinating.
