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Monday, September 12, 2016

Great Photographs Lead to Good Covers

I've been fortunate in being able to find and use various images from photographers for covers of many of my works. The first photographer I came across, Jared Wingate, is from my old home town of Larned, Kansas. Jared now lives in Texas and has made an impressive name for himself as a photographer of popular rock groups. I was stumped for what image to use on the literary novella One More Victim when searching through Jared's online portfolio I saw the image of a woman floating over a bridge. It seemed to capture the mood of One More Victim. The model is Jared's wife. The image is now used on the paperback of a collection of literary short works in which Victim is the lead story.


Later, I ran across Karen Garlow Piper, a photographer in Hutchinson, KS, who has a special love of sunset and weather shots. A couple of lightning storms play critical roles in the novella, so for the single story digital offering of Victim I used Karen's image.








Another of her landscape sunset shots seemed perfect for the short story Innocent Passage, a most unusual coming of age tale.











The Notebook is a longer story in which a professor returns to his old campus for a seminar and Jeremy remembers he left a notebook in the attic of the house where he lived when a student. He wonders if it might still be there. He rings the doorbell and meets Sarah. This is a story the end of which no reader has foretold. Jared's photo manipulation, again using his wife as model, seemed perfect.







I'd known Ray Inman from his years as a photographer at The Kansas City Star. I was fortunate he was the photographer who came to take my picture for a short item about me in a local magazine. A portrait he took of me is the one I most frequently use. I've used two different covers for The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley, a Lovecraftian novella that many Lovecraft fans have praised. I've never been happy with either cover when Roy searched his portfolio and came up with a shot he manipulated that does a wonderful job of piquing the curiosity of potential readers.


And in the post before this one you'll see another use of a photograph for cover, this one for a non-fiction piece of prose, The Rita Chronicles, with photo by KC news video news reporter John Tygart.

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