Cover art insight: Lethal Seasons

Alice Sabo's brief for Lethal Seasons was clear from the outset – a tornado set against the Blue Ridge Mountains and a landscape devastated by storms and an overgrown, neglected infrastructure.

This was Alice's first foray into science fiction, but in a post apocalyptic setting, so it was important to get the right atmosphere and feel – you should be able to look at a cover and know what you're in for.

Having looked at the landscape, I thought of a perspective scene, following a road covered in fallen trees, with the tornado looming in the distance. Here are my preliminary sketches:

To inject an additional element of horror into the cover, I vignetted the image with splattered blood and virus cells. With the cover art worked up, the next stage was looking at the typography and how to really integrate the title into the cover. While I tried out various conventional approaches as well as graphical treatments of the text containing virus elements.

And the end result:

...available now in print and ebook from Amazon, iTunes, Kindle, Kobo, Barnes & Noble etc.