I'm Looking for a Cover Artist/ Introductory Notes on my Second Novel: Komojo!

Do you like Books and Video Games? Do you make Art?

Hi friends,

I’m working on the last revisions of my second novel, Komojo!, and have arrived at the point at which I’m ready to begin looking for an illustrator or cover artist.

The book, in brief, features [redacted], a young man who drops out of college in his Midwestern college town to manage a copy store by day and lead a world-famous online gaming organization at night. When [redacted] makes the mistake of sleeping with one of his employees, he throws both of his worlds into disarray.

The book is literary, and occasionally high-toned, but covers some ‘low’ subject matter and ‘low’ deeds. I’m always interested in these ‘how life appears on the surface’ and ‘how life is behind the scenes’ contrasts—Prince Hal torn between his father’s life in court and Falstaff’s life in the bars and brothels—and I’m interested in the ways ‘high’ literary fiction might be written about the ‘low’ art of online gaming… And so I’m looking for someone who’s preferably on Substack and can do something interesting for me: I want an artistic cover that might be able to capture some of these contradictions—or at least make my book look like the awesome cover of an awesome 80’s or ‘90’s video game.

I’m desirous of something colorful, so it’d be cool if my artist liked greens, reds, silvers, and golds (this is how the video game’s opening screen is described in the book), and I’d like the figure of a kind of ‘holy warrior knight’ with a maul centered—but it should be a more ‘video-game-cartoonish’ cover than ‘realistic-fantasy-novel’ cover. I’d also prefer something that was made by hand: hand-drawn, hand-painted—I know it sounds weird, but I think something that was, well, oil painted or oil painted with a caricatured, pen-and-ink knight, or something done in mixed-media would be cool. I’d rather not have something that was done—or at least not initially done—with computer illustration software. I’m up for mixed-media, and I’m up for collaged approaches as well.

Just to offer some starter ideas, I’ve included some video game ‘start’ screens and covers of some of my favorite classic video games below.

Clearly if you’ve read this far, you can tell I’m a crazy person, so you’d be working with a crazy person if you contacted me in the interest of doing this. (Though my cover designer for my first novel said I was a pleasure to work with! Really! He did!) Also: you’d be working with an independent novelist and high school teacher—so my budget isn’t exactly huge. I’m hoping to pay a few hundred dollars for good work and then sing your praises loudly and widely on Substack if you take me on.

Some inspirational pics:

Here are a few favorite book covers that come to mind when I think about this project:

I’ve always been fond of the weight of the green on this cover, and I’ve always liked the way the buildings and their windows gave the impression of texture to it. I’ve felt the cover of Komojo! should have a verdant background of thick green forest/jungle leaves, trunks, and foliage to provide texture backing the central figure who emerges.

I’ve always admired the small, caricature-ish figures on Joshua Ferris's cover (and the ones near the copy machine on this novel’s back) and thought that working two or three little ‘corporate worker bee’ images to reflect my protagonist’s day job on my own front and back cover would be very cool.

This is one of my favorite ‘collaged’ covers—and I like its whimsicality to boot. Something similar done on a painted or painterly background of green verdant leaves might be the way to go!

If you’re interested in designing a cover for a novel like the one I’ve described, please message me and I’ll try to make this decision in the coming month or so. In terms of deadlines, I’m pretty flexible: I’d prefer the work be done in four or five months, but could wait six or eight for the right person and the right price!

Thanks for reading—and feel free to pass this along to any independent cover artists you might know,

Peter

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist, essayist, short story writer, and educator. His novel Why Teach? is available from Bookshop.org, B&N, Amazon, Kindle Store, and Kobo.