Blog Tour - Blood Storm

Blog Tour - Blood Storm

The Blood Storm Cover
Guest Post by Rhiannon Hart

Blood Storm - Cover

  

The cover of Blood Storm features the same cover girl as Blood Song, a young woman from the States called Ana. She takes photographs of herself that she posts free online, for use by digital artists. One such artist created the gorgeous darkened forest scene that you see on Blood Song.

For the Blood Storm cover, I'm not exactly sure who worked on the photo to turn it into Zeraphina with her hair blowing in the wind and that gorgeous detail on the dress, but I think it might have been the designer, Astred. She developed four cover concepts, two in which Zeraphina is standing on the deck of a boat and two where she's standing in a desert. The desert scenes were lovely, one dark blue and the other in the golds and pinks of dawn. But lovely as they were, they didn't go with the "storm" in the title. One of the boat scenes was a possibility, but looked a bit funny. The other was really great, with it's pointy prow and stormy sky with the stars peeping through. Best of all, it was reminiscent of one of the scenes of the book, as the cover of Blood Song is. But it still wasn't perfect.

Astred went through dozens and dozens of pictures of boats, looking for exactly the right one. It was hard, as there aren't a great deal of pictures taken from the perspective of someone standing on the deck of a boat, and one that is also ye olde in appearance. So the boat, much to my disappointment, was scrapped.

When I was finally presented with the cover almost as you see it now, it took a while for me to love it. But the more I looked, the more it grew on me. The crashing waves were very beautiful, and Zeraphina did look like she was standing on the shore, which she never quite did with the boat covers. Then Griffin was added, and I fell in love with it completely. And that's the story of the cover.

Blood Storm Chapter 1

Rhianna Hart - Author

  

Rhiannon Hart remembers writing before she could read, puzzling over the strange squiggles in Jeremiah and the Dark Woods by Janet and Alan Ahlberg and putting her own words in their places. Her first love was Jareth the Goblin King at the tender age of eight. She wrote fan fiction in high school but she'd never admit to it out loud, so don't ask. When she's not reading or writing she is belly dancing, chasing after other people's cats, or putting the pedal to the floor at her sewing machine. She grew up in north-western Australia and currently resides in Melbourne, where she works in marketing. Rhiannon has been published in the Australian Book Review, Magpies and Viewpoint and blogs at http://rhiannon-hart.blogspot.com/.

Thanks to Rhiannon for all your hard work in putting together this blog tour.

For the next stop on the
Blood Storm Blog Tour
tomorrow visit
The Eclectric Reader.