COVER REVEAL: The Peculiar

Ta-DAW! Here 'tis. The cover for The Peculiar... 

Isn't it cool?

When I first saw the image as a thumbnail in my inbox, I was like "Hem. Surely that's not my cover. It's far too happy-looking."

When I enlarged it and looked at it full-size I was like, "Hem. That sky is really blue."

When I looked at it again, I was like, "Yeeeeeah, I must hear what others have to say about it, because I don't know how to think for myself."

...

"Wait, hngg?" you say. "You are a clueless-bebeh-author. You are kind of obligated to be like 'Why, goodness me, it's igSAKLY how I imagined it should be."

I KNOW.

And I did like it. I loved parts of it. But... But... But it didn't look like the imaginary-and-totally-non-commercial-cover for which I had vague notions in my head.

That sounds really bratty, especially now when I look at the awesome ARCs I was sent, and pat them adoringly, and admire how the colours pop, and how the bird is all gold-foil and embossed, and how the sky is this metallic shimmery blue stuff, and how the artwork shows rather precisely a scene from the book.

But at the time I was just like, "Where is the glooooom? The doom? The gothic, the faery, and the fantasy???" 

I love it now, though. Now that I've seen it in real life. I think that whoever designed it, and drew it, and made it did a really fantastic job, and I'm seriously happy with how it turned out. The artist even carried over some of the details from the book, like the north-south-east-west symbols on the bird's chest, and the blue-ish glow inside, and the capsule for carrying secret-and-most-definitely-sinister messages.

Also: black feathers. Those are important.

Technically none of that matters anyway, though, because the book is shiny. And shiny is of paramount importance. When I was twelve I would always, alwayyyys bee-line it to the shiniest book in the bookstore. I once paid fifty franks for a hardcover of The Looking Glass Wars (fifty franks being my allowance for, like, my entire life) and I didn't really like the book BUT ALL WAS OK because it had a shiny, holographic cover. It's possible I was just a very shallow twelve-year-old, but whatever... Shiny is good. 

I'll do an ARC freak-out post some time later on, and possibly give away a copy, and then you'll be able to see the book from every possible angle in all its shiny, metallic, gold-embossed, shiny glory, because I'll take lots of unnecessary photos.

Bye. :)