It’s never easy on these books of mine to get 1. the right cover right out of the gate and 2. the cover formatted the correct way. Of all the books this one has definitely gone through the most cover iterations.
Initially, when I had first been thinking of this as at least a collection of stories I had a cover design all ready. It would be the image of a decrepit cemetery with blood bubbling up from the graves. Not over the top but creepy. THAT was always the plan. As I neared completion of editing the book though I started to wonder if there wasn’t a better way to do it. If there wasn’t a better idea.
I loved the idea of drawing the cover because it’s one of those things I just like to do, I like to do my covers. But then there’s reality, is the cover I see in my mind and I like one that would entice people to pick it up?
I like that. But I also know that my art style does not skew to the realistic. It skews cartoony and I am not sure that was what would work. So I decided to do a photo for the cover. My fiancée and me got all bloody and I set things up and figured I’d shoot the cover.
I really liked how these turned out. Simple but effective and it conveyed the feeling I wanted of dread and danger. I really like these. But in speaking to an artist friend he offered that yeah, those were cool but he could make them cooler. He could make them better. My friend Loren Gillespie III is a darned good artist and I have known him long enough to trust him so I trusted what he wanted to do.
I liked all three covers, which he did illustrations on to give them a different feel, dangerous but surreal, but of the three I liked the last one the best. I liked the colors and the feel of that world. So that was the version I finally went with.
Naturally things never quite work as you think so it had to be tweaked a little further to get it approved for print but this was it. This was the cover. This was the world of CEMETERY EARTH. I love this cover. Loren did an amazing job and I am really honored to have his work on the cover. We had worked together nearly twenty years ago on ‘zines and here we were working together again. Pretty awesome and fitting because this is a book that had lived in me for a very long time and stories that had been born years ago.
I really think that this is the cover. This is the cover that fits a book I am very, very happy with.
This really is CEMETERY EARTH.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 