And the front cover is finished! The artist, Scott Christian Sava, added visible breath to Mungus and detailed the snow. I think it looks pretty fantastic. Not only will serve as an eye-catching cover (I hope), but it’ll look great on my wall since it’s a watercolor and I’ll get the original.
The next step is the back cover. We were originally going to do a wrap-around, but as I explained in a previous post, he was having trouble with the illustration and split it into two pieces. Wraparounds are always tricky when you don’t have a final page count anyway, as you don’t know how wide to make the area that will cover the book’s spine. Zack Jackson & The Cult of Athos is sitting on my desk awaiting revisions while I work on Iron Fist of the Oroqs, so that final page count is some months away.
I also haven’t decided yet if I’ll include an educational component with Zack Jackson, namely a glossary of some of the more advanced scientific terms and concepts I talk about in the book. I bend the laws of physics in a couple of places, so it might be neat to include simplified explanations of how we believe the universe really works. Then again, I wouldn’t want to destroy someone’s believe in our ability to travel to other worlds. That would be sad.