erastes

I'll give it a go - they can only say no, right?

thanks!

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marquesate.livejournal.com

exactly! :-)

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copperbeech.livejournal.com

To avoid insulting the artist, ask her flat out what she charges for commissions usually, then tack onto that yourself what it is worth to you to become the title holder of the artwork. It is my understanding that there is no royalty for commissioned artwork for a book cover. One flat amount is paid to the artist at contract (usually by the publisher, but that is when the publisher has sought out the art, not the author), with title of the art handed over to you for you to do what you want with it (promos, etc), with the stipulation that the artist's name remain intact with the artwork. I did not have to negotiate that for my cover art, but that would be my approach.

As for existing art that you want to use, contact the current possessor of the original and follow much the same process. The current possessor will likely have a "rate" already in mind, particularly since this is a museum. The ball will be more in their court than yours, in that scenario.

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That's the thing, she hasn't done one before, and her answer was "tell me how much you are willing to pay"...

Thanks - that's very useful! I doubt I'll be allowed to use it, for a gay novel... but I can only try.

Thanks again

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copperbeech.livejournal.com

Ooops. I will also add, the cover art for my book existed prior to my book. The artist still sells prints of the piece, but it is a completely separate legal entity from what became my book cover. Same image, just has the text overlay, etc. So... if you don't want the print to remain available for sale in the commissioned scenario, think about that when you approach contracts, as well.

I think I'm done now =)

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logophilos.livejournal.com

Buying the copyright of the art, as opposed to a license to use it, will be *very* much more expensive, and most artists won't sell it anyway (in fact, not sure they can, unless they do it as part of their employment.) YOu buy the right to use the piece on the cover and promotions, and the artist can continue to do what they like with the piece, so they don't have to charge so much for the loss of revenue. The art by lj user="kiriko_moth"> on my website was all bought on commission, but she retains the right to sell the images as and when she wants to. I just have the right to use it on my site, or as she otherwise gives me permission to do.

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anderyn.livejournal.com

Speaking as someone who HAS commissioned art (see my icon for a sample, though it's just a scan of the art itself) -- it depends on the medium as well as the artist -- a watercolor is less expensive than an oil, a completely done-on-the-computer piece is usually less expensive as well -- due to the cost and complexity of the materials. Check around to see what the going rate is for a picture of the size/detail of the one you want in the fan areas, I would say, since there are a good many commissioned pieces there, and in the furry forums, too -- it varies there, but you can get a ball park figure for the kind of piece you're thinking of.

My favorite artist, alas, has gone up in price since my first commission, and I probably wouldn't be able to afford her again, unless I had a huge budget. (She goes for several hundred a painting now. When I got the first one, it was less than a hundred, and I was v. happy.)

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Oh, medium does make a big difference and not always to the quality. I charge considerably less for pastel paintings than I would for a watercolor, oil or acrylic painting -- or the top end, my colored pencil realism pieces that take forever and a day to finish. The amount of work an artist has to put into the piece plus the amount of time it takes will affect the price. Oil paintings need to dry for a long time before they can be finished, so oil paintings aren't always a good choice for book cover art if you want it in print fast. Acrylics are done when they're done and so are pastels or colored pencils.

Yep, that happens with good artists. You can luck and find them when they're cheap, but as they gain appreciation they'll quickly fill up their commissions queue and charge accordingly.

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Thank you! That's very useful!

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storm-grant.livejournal.com

I commissioned a painting from a friend for C$300. A person I know paid $1500 for cover art for an frickin' ebook. The art of my zines cost me 1 set of zines for 3 or 4 pieces of art. Make her an offer. If she's so easily insulted, you may wish to rethink your involvement with her. What happens if you ask her for a change in the art?

I can't imagine that painting isn't in the public domain and therefore free for the taking. You might consider just looking through public domain art and finding something there. Let me dig out some URLs for you.

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storm-grant.livejournal.com

Here's a ton of public domain art:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/20/15451/6564

Here are the artists that did my most recent zine covers:
http://www.lorrainebrevig.com/
http://crysothemis.deviantart.com/
These are notphotomanips, but original art.

Ask them what they'd charge for a cover. Even if you're not interested in their art, it should give you an idea what to offer to your friend.

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Thank you! I've always wanted to know where to get domain free art!

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logophilos.livejournal.com

One way around the Cromwell image thing might be to commission an artist to do something 'inspired' by it - so long as it's not a direct copy, and only a fragment, it's not going to be a copyright issue. You only have to pay the artist's fee.

The price of the cover very much depends on the artist and the use. If she's not well known enough to have done this before, then ask her to set the price and see if your publisher will wear it. They will decide if it's unreasonable or not.

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elisa-rolle.livejournal.com

I know it's not your genre but to give you an idea of price of original artwork here is the page of P.L. Nunn (she has made cover art for Bobby Michaels, Jet Mykles, Jade Buchanan, Willa Okati)...

http://bishonenworks.com/cart/main/index.php?mode=catalogue&select=Commission&filter=all

ciao, elisa

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madrigalist.livejournal.com

In order to use an image from classic art you will have to get the licensing for that piece. First you would have to make certain it is available. Most art licensing goes by the rights applied the size of the image, the print run of your book, the foreign rights you will need etc.

I have lined up several painting with Christies in New York for possible images for my works. They are very approachable and open to working with you on the pricing.

http://www.christiesimages.com

They also may be able to connect you with other sources

Mav

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I should have looked at the National Portrait Gallery page first - they make it very easy!

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galadhir.livejournal.com

Something like this?

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Yes.. *swoons * that's exactly it.

:) Would be PERFECT for the book, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Thankyou!

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Looks like it will be a possibility! Update soon!

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Ack. How to get artwork on books is recommending the artist to the publisher, and the publisher pays the artist a whopping lot of money. Or they don't hire your pick and you get a cover you got little or no say in from an artist they paid a lot of money. I found this out painfully years ago, but the marketing idea is to pair experienced popular artists with new writers to launch them.

If you just suggest an artist rather than trying to tell them what to do with the cover though, they do sometimes take your suggestions into account -- and then your artist friend gets paid a whole lot more than you could afford.

For purchasing a Print On Demand cover, the going rate is $200 to do it your way and you get the quality of artist that'll do it for $200, which is pot luck but may contain some pretty darn good illustrators depending on how their stuff goes. Generally the top end book covers go for much more than that but the distribution's bigger. I think sometimes cover artists get royalties. Don't offer a royalty split on Print On Demand or ebook covers though because then you have to keep track of it forever.

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I'm very lucky with my publisher as they allow me to design my own cover - rare I know, and I'll be horrified at the lack of control if and when I move to a bigger publisher - Standish was my own picture for example, so I think they'll be ok with the Cromwell idea - think I'll save the commissioned work for a later book...

Thanks Sweetie, good to hear from you
xxx

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Ooooh that is wonderful, and you ARE lucky! Congratulations! I'm not free at the moment but once I finish the portrait I was commissioned for, I might be available to do a cover artwork. Depending on licensing of the original painting you showed -- you were looking at just the hands, right? I could conceivably use that as a reference and come up with something good that's not copyrighted to the museum that owns the artwork. I found out I'm not too bad at copying historic art when I did a couple of noses from Leonardo da Vinci sketches for reference in an eHow article on How to Draw a Nose.

Hands are actually easy from historic paintings and drawings.

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it's basically English Civil War, so it was "man in armour + someone undressing him" that I was going for (plus it was Oliver Cromwell which is always a bonus if I can cast aspersions at him!

:)

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Sounds cool. How soon is this needing to be done? I'm thinking if you wanted a painting for it that looked archaic, my usual acrylics style comes very close to an oil painting look and of course works up very fast. Or there's pastels, if it doesn't matter that the medium look like it's within period to the novel. It's intriguing to me because when I was a little kid deciding to be a writer, I thought doing book covers would rock too, especially of course doing my own, but cover illos are a cool thing.

Hehehe aspersions on Cromwell sound like fun! He was an evil git, wasn't he? Nothing like flaming the dead, justifiably.

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So you can get acrylics to look more like oils? I've been wondering about that for doing medieval style paintings in the short(ish) term.

I assume you don't thin the paints for that. Do you have to find acrylics that are opaque or do student paints do well enough? *is curious*

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Two different things.

For medieval looking paintings that look as if they were done in tempera or egg tempera, I use gouache which is entirely opaque watercolour. It's close to the medieval tempera, beautifully close, handles the same ways. I will someday try doing Sennelier Egg Tempera to do it verbatim, but that's more the opaque approach with delicate brush strokes and shading a step at a time through twenty steps to get smooth shading.

To make acrylics look like oils, I use tube acrylics and turn them into glazes with Acrylic Gloss Medium. I emulate the "fat over thin" oil painting method by starting with a value painting in water-thinned dark brown, usually Burnt Umber or Sepia. Then I might do a grisaille layer, a detailed value painting over the brown value painting like a black and white photograph, I haven't always done this layer but I've read about it since I did the last one and it's intriguing. I go right from the tube on that layer.

Then I begin to mix colours and apply a colour layer over the grisaille or sepia layer, whichever I did. I put in the base colours and shadows, this will get detailed as well since if I didn't do the grisaille layer it's where I put in all the details.

Then finally over that I do the equivalent of all the glazing layers in oils, where I will mix colours with more and more acrylic gloss medium. This looks cloudy, dries clear and is about as thick as the tube paint, which gives me the buttery feel of tube oils. I do glaze after glaze until it's not only perfect but has that richness that oil paintings get. It usually does not need a final varnish at that point, though I could give it one with a last layer of acrylic gloss medium that had no pigment in it.

Whether acrylics are opaque or translucent or transparent is a pigment factor, not a quality factor between student and artist grade. Student grade paint has less pigment to binder ratio, and it takes more to accomplish the same effect. Student grade paints also use hues for the more expensive pigments (although some Artist grade paints are also hues) which are synthetic equivalents of the original, usually toxic or not that lightfast, mineral or vegetable pigment.

I like the heavy pigment saturation of artist grade paints, and recently upgraded from Winsor & Newton Galeria (student) acrylics to Finity (artist) grade acrylics. So far I stick to Winsor and Newton mostly because I know it so well, know how it handles and what my favourite pigments are and do. I might branch out into some other brands occasionally later on but it's not a high priority.

I use transparent colours differently from opaque ones. The transparent ones are very good for the faux oils effect since I can underpaint them with something of the right value, or even with a related hue and then go over it with something rich like Alizarin Crimson for dramatic effect.

Here's an acrylic painting I did recently using oil-like effects and transparent Alizarin Crimson for the background: Calla Lily is a bit yellower (warmer) than it is in reality, the background being Alizarin Crimson is a very purplish red. But the scan came out looking nice anyway and the effect would be the same whether it was a warmer transparent red or a cold transparent red.

Recently I bought some acrylic retarder medium that will allow me to do some wet into wet work if I go fast, I'm not sure how much it'll slow drying but if it does it for an hour or two, that's enough for me to get some of the other oils effects that I've avoided by doing mostly glazing. Glazing is wet transparent layers over dry paint, and in oils it's stunning but it takes weeks and months to finish a painting. I don't have artist grade oils yet, but will probably upgrade eventually sometime after I finish collecting coloured pencils full range sets.

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*blinks* Wow. Lots of info.

I'll definitely copy and past this into a file to look at again later.

At the moment I'm still at a pretty rudimentary stage of acrylic painting. But I would love to get into the more complex to do portraits of friends in medieval garb and/or armour.

I'm sure this information will be useful at the point I start poking at oil-painting books that talk more about how to do the different layers of the old portrait (etc) paintings.

Thanks :)

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That pretty much IS the Renaissance method of doing rich and beautiful oil paintings. Except the sepia underpainting layer is thinned oil paint with lots of turpentine or odorless mineral spirits, the tube-paint layer is the medium layer (grisaille and first colour layer), and then glazes go over that, sometimes blended in wet into wet but often wait and do the next layer of glazing with successively more oil in later layers. This is why good oil paintings take maybe a year to complete. They need six months to a year to cure completely when there are oily layers, so those dry completely before the damar resin varnish is applied to protect them.

Damar varnish gives it the shine and one last layer of richness on actual oil paintings.

I was taught in person by an old painter in New Orleans who did the Renaissance Method, and invited me to his classes for free because he liked my work. Later on I found many websites that talked about the same processes, including the grisaille (grayscale) layer with its French term. Russian painters called that "the dead layer" which I find so poetic!

I think what happens is that even the opaque layers are translucent, light bounces off the colors and the grays and the browns to harmonize and mix to something much richer than one layer of colour would give. I know I love how it looks when I put the time in on it. But in acrylics, the equivalent time can be done in a day or two or three depending on how many layers and how large the painting is -- and it really does look a lot like I did it in oils!

Most of the acrylic painters I know are doing either wild knife work, weird stuff, or things that involve pure colour with tints and shades of it. There was one fantasy artist who published a book of aliens -- and every one of them that had a green or magenta or whatever skin tone was not painted like a green lizard or magenta baboon butt, where the local colour is modified by the light and the shadows and the reflections of colours around it. He just did them shading up to nearly white and tinting with black, so they looked like they were all made out of plastic no matter how well modeled or detailed. This bugged me. I have seen friends do much better acrylics than that, but this idjit got book cover contracts from major publishers and got this book contract to do his own collection of famous aliens... and none of them looked real. Recognizable but not realistic.

Heh, good thing I'm not slamming someone by name. Maybe that style of "looks like plastic" acrylic painting is appealing to some people. But some part of me bridles at it and wants to make the quick-drying modern paint produce the wonderful realism I know it can when I mix and use it the way oils work.

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I know what you mean with the plastic look. Currently I'm in the 'ooo I can paint stuff that looks nice when I have decent brushes' sort of stage. But I don't think it's going to take long to get to the 'but it doesn't look good enough' whine *grin*.

If you have a couple of wesites to reccomend that would be good for getting a visualisation of how each layer should work that would be great. If it isn't convenient I'm sure I can find some and some books myself.

Thanks again :)

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ArtPapa is the Russian one that I remembered, the fellow that calls it The Dead Layer. He has some free lessons up, plus forums and gallery and his art sales of course.

EmptyEasel.com has good articles and a free newsletter I subscribed to.

Winsor & Newton's official site has some great tutorials on painting in watercolour, acrylics and oils. I couldn't remember which site had the free Oil Colour book, but this is it! I just checked for oils lessons and whoa, there it was in the Library under Publications. It's a good sized, excellent e-book on oil painting and completely free.

ArtPapa has examples of all those layers on his rose painting and green apple painting and other painting lesson paintings. They're very interesting, and confirmed what the old New Orleans painter taught me. His palette is a little different, Winsor & Newton recommends the palette that the old painter taught me -- use white, your three earth tones (yellow ochre, burnt sienna or another reddish earth, burnt umber or another dark brown), a warm and cold yellow, warm and cold red, warm and cold blue, and if you want bright greens in it, warm and cold greens too. Black is not as useful as mixing Alizarin Crimson and Ultramarine to get a rich jazzy black in exactly the right proportions, it turns a nice purple before it gets to black.

I took in things from all those websites and then make my own decisions on things like palettes and which pigments I like best and so on. Hope these help!

I know what you mean about the "but it doesn't look good enough" whine. I think that may be lifelong for painters. No matter how deep you get into it, the moment you really learn something, another thing that was out of reach comes heaving over the horizon and you want to achieve that next level. If no one else has before, it sneaks up and starts bugging you to invent it.

It just seems odd to me that so few acrylic painters really use the potential of the pigments for mixing as well as they would in watercolour or oils. Except for the watercolourists that take up acrylics as a watercolour alternative, their paintings come out looking a lot like their watercolours, whatever their watercolour style is.

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I can do basic mixing from the primaries but have no idea what to do with the more complex stuff.

Can you reccomend the minimum I'd need to buy to get started dabbling (my budget is extrememly tight atm). I have the basic set of primaries in big student tubes (black, white, and cool red, yellow and blue). I also have a number of small tubes that don't have colour names on them (black, white, yellow, orange/red and light and dark of brown, green and blue)

Also is this the kind of thing that you can get started on heavy cartridge or w/c paper, or do you really need to buy canvasses?

I got a head start on the whine. I grew up with paintings from two grandmothers hanging in the house. One was a commercial artist in England (We have a large oil self portrait of hers that watches you) and the other spent about 30 yrs doing oils as a hobby and teaching others (she wouldn't have been doing proper layer work but she was getting pretty good towards the end). So when I did school art at 14 and they gave us those big paste brushes to work with I hated everything I did and didn't take art again until 14 years later :P

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There are three inexpensive earth tones I recommend having around: Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber. You can mix neutrals, but toning brights with those earth tones rocks and if you're going to do people at all, Burnt Sienna is the base skin tone color for anyone white -- it is the best mixer for skin tones. If you get only one earth tone, get Burnt Sienna.

Definitely get a green. Pthalo Green Blue Shade or Yellow Shade is good. At least one green. Two greens, warm and cold, would be Pthalo Green Blue Shade aka Winsor Green Blue Shade, and Sap Green. Those will let you get a full range of greens. Greens do not mix well.

If you're doing anything with violet you NEED to have Permanent Rose or a rose color to mix purple, neither Alizarin Crimson nor Cadmium Red will mix a good clear purple. Technically by the color wheel you can do it with nothing but primaries, but you won't get the true brights in greens and purples without having at least one on the palette.

If you use purple a lot get Dioxazine Violet aka Winsor Violet.

Black is not actually needed! I'm not kidding. If you already have it, fine, but using Burnt Umber and Ultramarine or Alizarin and Ultramarine together makes a much better black. Paynes Grey is a useful darkener to the cool side.

The three primaries I would use if all I had was primaries and white are Ultramarine Blue, Permanent Rose in lieu of red and Lemon Yellow. But you'll have much more flexibility if you add to those a warm yellow like Cadmium Yellow Hue, a warm red like Cadmium Red Light Hue, and a warm blue like Pthalo Blue Green Shade / Winsor Blue Green Shade. Plus Sap Green and Burnt Sienna or Pthalo Green and Burnt Sienna.

Also get the biggest tube of white, it gets used up faster than anything.

Ugh, at 14 you were using big paste brushes? What were you working with, tempera? That's bizarre. I like using pointed rounds more than anything else, though I'll use a 3/4" flat wash brush in watercolor and sometimes use flats in oil and acrylic because I can push the paint around easier with them.

I reread your list of what you have, and while you'll have to watch out for using the small tubes up, it sounds as if you've got enough to start with. Light and dark brown, green and blue are enough to get going. But if the brown is not reddish like Burnt Sienna, you may want to get that.

So look for Permanent Rose and Burnt Sienna to fill it out, in good inexpensive brands.

It's odd. I will very often use a limited palette in a particular painting, but it won't always be the same one. I don't have specific colours I use all the time except that earth tones trio and Permanent Rose. Heh, that'd make an amusing painting in itself, using just the earth tones trio and Permanent Rose. I might have to bring in Paynes Gray to have a cold bluish color in it.

Paynes Gray is almost black but shades up very light, it's a bluish gray, like a slate colour. It's so useful. I like it better than black for anything where I have to darken cool colours, and I darken warm colours with deep brown.

I created most of my mixing by experimentation.

The cheapest substrate would be a canvas paper pad, because each sheet is like having another canvas. Also if it comes out well it can always be put onto stretchers like a normal canvas by a framer. Blick Canvas Pad is an example of what I mean by those, it's inexpensive at $5.99 for ten 9 x 12" sheets. Canvas panels aren't real expensive either. Canvas Boards cost less than a dollar on Blick, it's 77 cents for a 9 x 12" board versus 59 cents for an unsupported sheet in the canvas pad.

But both of those have the canvas texture that catches the thick paint and helps shade it and give it that painting-look. Or you can work on gessoed wood panels and things, some artists use watercolor paper. But heavy watercolor paper may cost more than the canvas panels or pads.

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Ugh, at 14 you were using big paste brushes? What were you working with, tempera? That's bizarre. I like using pointed rounds more than anything else, though I'll use a 3/4" flat wash brush in watercolor and sometimes use flats in oil and acrylic because I can push the paint around easier with them.

Nope, just school acrylics. School art was cheap like that. It wasn't until this year when I got my hands on a nice range of pointed etc. brushes (I went back to community college to do the 16yr old art level) that I found I could do paintings that I actually felt proud of :P

Thank you for all your time :). It's useful knowing that I can get started on just a couple more tubes of paint and some paper. Means I might be able to squeeze the money out this week :). Then I can start poking in time to figure out if I can do a Christmas-present dragon with that technique or if it's better to stick to what I know on that short a term.

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Oooh that's great! Yeah, the canvas pads are fantastic. You can even mount them to boards later on if you want to, the paper in them is very stiff and heavy with the gesso. Sounds great! I hope you can find them on sale or cheap at clearance or something. Permanent Rose is the most useful red color I've found, it mixes the way reds are supposed to. Weird, but it does. Burnt Sienna works well monochrome too, for a very interesting effect shade something entirely in Burnt Sienna and white. It'll go almost to black when used pure from the tube.

Yikes, I'd have been hard put to do anything effective with school acrylics and a wide paste brush. I'd have trouble with that even now, since the paste brush doesn't have the thin chisel line turned on edge that a good flat does. Having the right tools and materials makes all the difference sometimes. It's why I'm getting Sascha the Prismacolor Scholar pencils this year for Yule, she likes colored pencils and those should give her better results.

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And it's such a relief when you do manage to get your hands on good brushes. It was amazing the difference from one painting to the next between using a cheap (but at least small) bristle to a pair cheap nylons, one flat and one pointed. Particularly when working on an A4 page :P

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Ooooh yes! I like the good synthetic brushes. They're inexpensive but perform so well. My favorite is a Size 6 Princeton Golden Taklon watercolor brush that I got in a Princeton Value Pack on sale from Blick. I bought one of those in size 4 for my granddaughter to use with her watercolor pencils, because at her age I was enraged at the blunt children's brushes that shed hairs and wouldn't give fine details or a clean line. She can beat it up and use it up and I'll get her new ones every year like the kid things, it's not that expensive.

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That's a good idea *thinks of the horrible little brushes that always came with the watercolour sets* *shudders*

Btw. Mind if I friend you? I don't post much at the moment but I generally manage to read each day.

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Ooh thank you! I'd appreciate that. I've been actually doing a drawing a day and most of the time I'll post them on my regular journal as well as

myartistdate which is where a bunch of the Mofos went after October ended. Purr!

I'm not sure but I think I already friended you. I will go check and if I didn't, I will. Fair warning, I don't always read and can go weeks without seeing an entry, then post comments out of the blue.

There are two things I believe about children and watercolours based on my experience of being a child that loved art and needed to learn. One is that those horrible little brushes are only suitable for painting designs on siblings' faces. Second is that transparent watercolour is NOT the medium to start small children with. Reserving light and white areas is a sophisticated concept.

Blick has a wonderful set of inexpensive student gouache called Morocolor, a 24 colour set was under five dollars. I bought it for the child of a housemate back in 2004 and it was perfectly good opaque watercolour with all the good mixing colours in it, and the colours that don't work well when mixed like greens and purples. I also got her the same Princeton Value Pack of brushes that my favourite one came from, figuring she could find out for herself if she liked rounds or angled flats or the one little flat-flat that was in the set. It was a little more than spending a dollar or two at the grocery for a children's set of transparent watercolour -- but she had no trouble doing what she wanted with it either, because she could put light over dark.

It took me thirty years to get good enough with transparent watercolour that if I put enough focus and concentration into it, I could get a painting I did not want to puke at. I think that is probably the most difficult painting medium in existence. Poster paints are just as cheap, and good brushes will let children learn brushwork instead of getting frustrated and giving up because it won't do what they want. Especially if they see adults doing good paintings, try to copy it and don't get the same results because they don't have the same supplies.

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Oh Gawd - no hurry at ALL. The book is in the re-write stage with no deadline, so whenever - months and months yet I would imagine!

;)

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nagasvoice.livejournal.com

I second

robertsloan2's suggestions.
What you would be buying is similar to "first North American serial rights" for a story, so that negotiating for ongoing use on a website should cost you more.
That said, the general advice is: Don't.
Not your job.
Not unless you're doing self-publishing, which you're not.

The publisher should be handling all that. On our side of the pond, mainstream and most genre publishers make all their own cover art choices of artist. It's important to them. They may or may not take your suggestions, but they should be interested in hearing them, as it's a useful insight into your understanding of the potential market. Also, they're always looking for good upcoming artists. Good editors keep an eye out and pass new artists along to their art directors.
However, the decision itself is a hard cold bit of money. Covers sell a lot more books than name of writers until you get very big. Paperback genre cover artists often get paid more than the writer. The decision is based on what their marketing folks perceive as necessary to sell that particular book, and they're the ones having to persuade bookstores to order, and the customers in the end determine what kind of cover art walks out the door. They're not always right, and there are fads in these things. That's how you can end up with a cover painting that's completely irrelevant to petty little details like what age, gender, or color the people in the story are.
Hope that helps.
The SFWA website has a lot of advice for writers, good for many of the genres and not just sf & f, but I think you may have already looked into that one?

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As I said to Robert, my publisher allowed me to design the cover for Standish, so if they take Transgressions, I'm simply pre-empting the process - it looks like the National Portrait Gallery is very affordable, their worldwide rights are less than £200 for a book cover, going up after 10,000 printings, which is unlikely!

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annebrooke.livejournal.com

I pay about £100-£150 for the cover art that Penelope Cline does for me (ADM, Thorn), but she is someone I know through Writewords, so I imagine that's discounted.

Yes, I think you should contact the gallery that holds the picture. That's what Goldenford are going to do for our last book of 2008 (Jay Margrave's "Holbein's Ambassadors")

Hope that helps!

A
xxx

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I was thinking about that figure, thank you, that's good to know - it's her first commission, so I dare say I can go in at that sort of price without offending her.

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Yay! I've contacted the National Portrait Gallery and they make it very easy - all done online! Will keep you posted!

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rwday.livejournal.com

Cool! Commissioned art! Though I like the idea of headless Cromwell - it has a sort of historical symmetry to it.

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I may use her for Fleury, as I've been in touch with the National Portrait Gallery and they do an online licencing thingy - seems they just grant them, no questions asked!

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rwday.livejournal.com

Excellent! Trans will have a pretty, pretty cover!

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