The Other Side of the Curtain was one of the three Pegasus Pulp launch titles and coincidentally also the first cover I ever created. That given, it’s not a bad cover. I even drove out specifically to a local junkyard to take the cover photo.
However, the photographic cover of The Other Side of the Curtain does not match the graphic cover of The Dark Lily very well, which is not a good thing, considering both novelettes are in the same series. So it was time for a redo.
My idea for the covers of the Zane Smith/Shoushan Kariyan series was always to play up the 1960s setting of the novelettes by doing the covers in the style of 1960s artwork and graphic design. Now the 1960s were a great decade for design, including graphic design, with a huge arrey of different styles coexesting with each other. For an overview of the range of graphic design created during the 1960s, check out the Pinterest Board I made for the Zane Smith and Shoushan Kariyan series.
The cover of The Dark Lily is pure psychedelia. For The Other Side of the Curtain, I decided to do something a little different and create an Andy Warhol style image.
Since The Other Side of the Curtain is a novelette about crossing the iron curtain, I started out with a stock photo of a surviving border watchtower and fence (now a museum) in the village of Mödlareuth. I then warholized the photo (and in true Warhol fashion, I actually made four different versions in different colour combinations) and added title and author in a 1960ish font.
Both covers still look very different and are not really “branded” in the conventional sense (bad indie author). However, the brand here is that both covers look recognizably 1960s retro. If I ever write more Zane Smith and Shoushan Kariyan stories (not sure yet, since they don’t sell very well), there may well be an Op-Art cover, a 1960s advertising art cover, a Roy Lichtenstein type cover, etc…