Titan, an Illustrated Novel

The Titan series went through many forms before it was finally released. I had been planning and developing the series for five years. I always knew that the cover art would be important to the tone of the series as an homage to the superhero monthly comics I grew up with, but it was the idea of what to put inside that I couldn't decide on. I knew I wanted interior artwork somehow, but how should it be laid out?

At one point I thought I wanted each chapter to have its own cover art. Since each chapter was to essentially represent a single issue of the Titan series as though it were a monthly comic. I also thought of having images run throughout the written pages, and really play with that as a style. Or, just have some kind of illustration for each chapter, sort of a representation of that chapter.

While I was working with my agent, Johanna Bates, I quickly came to realize that even getting the cover design I wanted would be unlikely if I went with traditional publishing. That meant, of course, that interior artwork was virtually out of the question. I found out quite a bit about how the publishing world really works. Costs and profit margins aligned to tell me that to get the book I wanted I would need to become an indie author. Only the could I maintain the creative freedom top put out the book as I actually envisioned.

At this point I could only get what art I could afford to get from freelance artists out there. Megan Furesz came in at the very end of the cycle and did a great job on short notice. her cover for Titan exceeded my expectations.  Now, I'm well into Titan 2, and Jena Stillwell is handling the artwork for this book. She has already done a fantastic cover that you can see several times throughout this blog.  I'm still paying everything out of my pocket, so it may not lead to my full artistic dream but it will be as close as I can get it. I hope to have double the amount of art pages in Titan 2, and time will only tell where things go from here. (Depicted below is art from Megan, Dan who was set to do the art of book one before he got tapped to work in video games, and Jena.)