With sinister echoes of 1984 and Brave New World, this original novel features a near-future city where medical science invents a single-dose pill for eradicating many common genetic defects . . .
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It’s omnibus week here in the Orbit Art Department, and the fangirl in me loves an omnibus. Get a whole story arc or series all in one giant go? Yes please! Today we have the cover launch for The Griffin Mage Trilogy by Rachel Neumeier, which collects Lord of the Changing Winds, Land of the Burning Sands, and Law of the Broken Earth.
I really enjoyed this series, it gave me a very Robin McKinley/Anne McCaffrey feeling and that’s a very good thing in my book. Classic heroine coming of age story, with a novel take on griffins, bringing them back to more wild animal (and wild magic) roots. I make no secret of my lack of griffin respect in their past fantasy incarnations, but I love that these griffins feel legitimately dangerous rather than cartoonish. That was the angle we took with the original covers, but I always love a chance to reinvent a cover for a new format, and here I think the cover gives the right feeling of menace, while still keeping Kes the center of the story.
We’ve been giving Mercy Thompson a new look recently and I think it looks great on her. These books feature the feisty Mercy — coyote shapeshifter, mechanic and finder-of-trouble — so we wanted something urban and adventurous to match. We also wanted the cover look, once created, to really pop on the shelf, so the front, back and spine (separate ‘design areas’!) all needed to complement each other and add to the effect.
One thing I love about our Orbit roster is our kickass heroines (often written by real-life kickass ladies)…but they’re not JUST kickass. (Ok, not allowed to say “kickass” for the rest of the post, promise.) Our heroines have unique voices and over the course of a series begin to feel utterly real. Sometimes when I am working on covers I literally hear a voice of a character in my head saying yea or nay. Now, I don’t create the art for Nicole Peeler’s Jane True books in the US, but I know illustrator Sharon Tancredi has got a little Jane inside her egging her on. I was so excited to see Blondie make the cover of Eye of the Tempest, Jane’s fourth adventure, and she looks like a fabulous teammate for Jane. Of course, it is known I have a soft spot for cool tattoos…and to really help our dynamic duo pop, we upped the boldness with a bright shock of red for the title bar. I’m also going to show the back cover, which I rarely do, but you must see the fantastic octopus Sharon created to go with the cover!
Shaun Mason, hero of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh Trilogy, explains what happened to the world. The trailer also features a sneak peak of the design for the third and final book in the trilogy, BLACKOUT!
Here’s another great wallpaper for all your fancy devices, this time for A. Lee Martinez’s CHASING THE MOON, out now in Hardcover.
Will Staehle has been doing fantastic covers for the A. Lee Martinez books. They’re not a series, and the designs all strongly stand alone, but Will’s quirky sensibility sets a tone across all the books that really works for Martinez’s voice. If you haven’t read any yet, you can jump in anywhere…but I think Divine Misfortune is my personal fave. (And it’s a great cover.)
Here’s all the wallpaper download links…if anyone needs a specific dimension made, let me know!
I am so excited to finally be launching the first three books of Kristen Painter’s House of Comarré series. You saw Blood Rights back in April, and I gave you a sneak peak of the covers for Flesh and Blood and Bad Blood, but we’ve been fine-tuning them for a while, and here they finally are, in all their gothic glory!
As you may know from old posts, I love tattoos, have quite a few, and have a soft spot for tattoos that are creatively worked into fantasy stories (props to Jacqueline Carey and the Kushiel books, of course), and I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say the gold ornament on our cover heroine is not just a pretty design…Kristen Painter has really created a very inventive world with the kind of interesting visual details that get a designer like me very happy. I hope that shows in the covers!
Nekro, the illustrator of these gorgeous covers, has really outdone himself here. These covers are amazing and I can’t wait to hear what you guys think…after the jump, you can see them full-size and get some teasers for the House of Comarré series…
I know it’s been a little while since we’ve done a fun wallpaper in the house (It was a great wallpaper too – Leviathan Wakes, if you didn’t download it you totally should!). So, I have written before about how much I love how the covers for the Simon Morden books came out, and have taken the opportunity to do a poster, a video, and now…wallpapers! Just in time for the third book to hit shelves. So make sure you go pick up Equations of Life, Theories of Flight, and Degrees of Freedom…
Available for screens of all sizes, now you can carry a mind-warping piece of the Metrozone with you everywhere! I even finally figured out how to make the ipad version work with the vertical/horizontal twist. As usual, if I missed a specific screen size you’d like, leave a comment and I’ll format it for you!
Bam! Can you say “EPIC”, people? The Riyria Revelations by Michael J. Sullivan are coming this November, December, and January, with more adventure and world-building than you epic fantasy fans will be able to handle. We wanted to give this series a cover style that spoke to fans of empire-building and political intrigue and armies clashing, but I really wanted to highlight the central axis of the books — the team of Royce and Hadrian, a thief and mercenary who get pulled into the plots and machinations of the empire despite their best (or worst) intentions. I think the marriage of the type and icons with the great illustrations by Larry Rostant give you the feel that it’s these two friends back to back against the world, and that is the engine that takes you through these books and across the world of Riyria.
After the jump, a small teaser from Book One: Theft of Swords to get you all excited…..
I’ve been looking forward to unveiling our cover visual for Rule 34, the latest brilliant near-future novel by Charles Stross. This one is set in Edinburgh in a future that’s just round the corner and takes us at a cracking pace though a complex series of bizarre interlinked crimes. We loved it and advance praise has been amazing too. But here’s the cover and some early quotes:
Cracking near-future crime laced with humour that’s exquisitely wrong’ Chris Brookmyre
‘A savvy, funny, viciously inventive science fiction novel that combines police procedure with the dark side of nerd culture to produce a grotesque and gripping page-turner’ Cory Doctorow
‘Charles Stross is a grandmaster of that most difficult science-fictional era, the near future. His novel, Rule 34, is a seamlessly transformation of our near-term everyday world into serious strangeness’
Vernor Vinge
It is with a mix of joy and sadness that I launch the cover for TIMELESS by Gail Carriger. Joy, because I have loved working on these covers so much, and I happen to be a nerd about things ancient Egyptian, so Alexia Tarabotti + Pyramids = Squee. However, it is sad because this is the final book in the adventures of Alexia Tarabotti!
Of course, that doesn’t mean the end of our Lady Maccon. Did you hear about the Yen Press manga Soulless adaptation being created as we speak? The artwork is amazing! I’ve seen the cover and first chapter, I just can’t wait to see more…Trust me, even if you’ve never thought manga was your thing, you have to keep tabs on this book as it develops. Stunning work, and bravo to our Yen Press brethren.
As usual, we have a fabulous image of The Lady Maccon, portrayed by Donna Ricci, the captain of the steamship we call ClockworkCouture.com. Alexia in her explorer’s gear was shot by Pixie Vision Productions, who was also responsible for documenting the awesome Afternoon Tea that Gail and Donna co-hosted recently in L.A. (There’s a great fan writeup of the event here). I so love collaborating with people active in the world of Steampunk when we’re doing steampunk and victorian titles (hmm, foreshadowing alert for next season perhaps?). Everyone already knows the lingo, they always catch my chronological aberrations, and even better, they always add things to the books that I would never have thought of on my own.
So without further ado, here’s a teaser for Timeless…
- - June 20th, 2011
It’s omnibus week here in the Orbit Art Department, and the fangirl in me loves an omnibus. Get a whole story arc or series all in one giant go? Yes please! Today we have the cover launch for The Griffin Mage Trilogy by Rachel Neumeier, which collects Lord of the Changing Winds, Land of the Burning Sands, and Law of the Broken Earth.
One thing I love about our Orbit roster is our kickass heroines (often written by real-life kickass ladies)…but they’re not JUST kickass. (Ok, not allowed to say “kickass” for the rest of the post, promise.) Our heroines have unique voices and over the course of a series begin to feel utterly real. Sometimes when I am working on covers I literally hear a voice of a character in my head saying yea or nay. Now, I don’t create the art for Nicole Peeler’s Jane True books in the US, but I know illustrator 
