Let’s Talk The Lantern’s Ember Cover!

I have been looking forward to sharing this book with all of you for a long time. The first thing you need to know about The Lantern’s Ember is…

This is the book I never knew I always wanted to write!

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love the classic monsters and the harvest theme and this book gives you all of that. What you don’t know is that this book is also my first try at writing steampunk. The idea of steampunk has always fascinated me but I wasn’t sure I knew enough about it to write a whole world surrounding the technology. In most cases with steampunk books, you hear about a mysterious element called aether. In my Otherworld, aether is synonymous with witchlight or witch power which fuels all the cool contraptions.

For those of you who wonder how Halloween and Steampunk go together, think Edward Scissorhands or pretty much any Tim Burton movie.

So, what’s going on with The Lantern’s Ember cover?

My original idea for the cover was to have it be my hero, Jack, sitting atop his bridge overlooking a leaf strewn path with a sleepy little town in the distance. I wanted it to be very obvious that it was a Halloween book.

When I first saw the cover my publisher created, I didn’t like it. I thought it looked more like Pirates of the Caribbean than Halloween. Don’t get me wrong. I love pirates. In fact, I have pirates in The Lantern’s Ember. Over time, the cover grew on me and now I’m quite attached to it. The tone matches the artwork of my other books very well and I think it’s interesting where the tiger books were all about the eyes and the Reawakened series was about the eyes, in this one there’s an absence of eyes, or, if you prefer, there’s a steampunk set of false eyes. Either way, there’s a lot more going on in this cover than meets the eye.