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.