I’ve bitten the bullet, bought image rights from istockphoto.com, and been playing around with cover images. This one is for The Maker’s Mask, from a photograph by Peter Zelei and a piece of concept art from loops7:
And this one is for The Hawkwood War, from a painting by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich and the same art from loops7:
So, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, I need about another two hundred and thirty-eight pictures to match the wordcount on the two books combined. 🙂
Word 2010, meanwhile, is trying to persuade me that the reason it keeps opening files from earlier iterations of Word as read-only is because of my settings, rather than its own settings that it imposed on me out of nowhere. I am not at all persuaded by Word’s attempts to cast me as the villain in this little drama, but I think I’ve got it to behave itself now.
Ankaret Wells 
Oh – those are both beautiful!
I am so grateful to Lucy for putting me on to istockphoto.com – they have some really gorgeous art there, and one of the things that was worrying me was having to have the basic Lulu cover due to not being able to draw. The rest of it is me, the GIMP, and a working knowledge of layers and the various colour tools. 🙂
Also, how did I not know that Kael and Jem’s story was available to buy from Torquere Press? *hurries off to buy ebook*
Hurrah! And I’m so glad you could find a cover model who actually looks like Tzenni!
Infuriatingly, istockphoto couldn’t produce me a model who looked like either Latinus or Innes for the second one. There were a couple of people who might have been Ligeia, if it wasn’t that Ligeia doesn’t pout vacantly at the camera or wear that much lipgloss. 🙂
Oh, those are lovely! I especially like the mask and the streams of bytes (bits?). Have you chosen fonts for title/author etc?
And just think, if you had been commercially published, you would never have had the fun of creating your own covers. Worse still, you might have been given covers that bear no resemblance to your characters or story.
Yes, this kind of publishing is exactly right for my control freak tendencies! And at least I don’t have to look at my book and think ‘But why did they give it a cover straight off of Good Show, Sir and call it The Sorceror’s Virgin?’ 🙂
Oooh, those are lovely, I’m intrigued by the contrast between the SF and more fantasy elements.
Also, Word is Evil, you have my sympathies!
This is why I wish I could just write in one genre or the other! I do have ideas for a fantasy brewing gently in the back of my head like a compost heap, but I’m not anywhere near being in a place where I’m ready to sit down and do serious worldbuilding – I have too many Requite stories bubbling over at the front of my head that want to get told first. (Well, I say I have ideas for a fantasy. I have ideas for a magic system, and a vague idea of tech level and setting. Until I actually get characters and a story, it can stay on the back burner)
I’m okay with Word 2010 until I spend an extended period of time using anything else, and then I start reflexively looking for menus and expecting ‘select all’ to be available off a right-click and it is all very annoying. I have no idea what Microsoft thought they were doing.