Behind the Scenes

We're coming up on the finale of the second volume of Alex Cheradon. Which has prompted me to design this:

Unfortunately, this has left me with a whole new problem. Because now the last two AC books look like this:

  

And, of course, they look pretty good. But books 1-3 look like this:

So I've been working out some possible alterations to see if I can give this volume of Alex a more uniformed, or at least a more connected appearence.

The biggest problem, of course, is Welcome to Crazytown. It's kind of perfect just the way it is and adding any yellow or tweaking it, kind of just ruins it. But adding white to the other books doesn't have the same kick as adding the yellow.

I like my series to have specific looks. I like the idea that you can glance at a group of a books and immediately know that they're in the same series.

Reapers in Heels turned out perfectly:

Of course, there's the first volume of Alex Cheradon, which looked like this:

And I liked the way these 3 turned out, too.

But this new volume of Alex. I don't know. I want a specific look for Alex. I just can't figure out what it is yet.

I've been thinking a lot about what genre Alex Cheradon would be in and I've settled on something like, science fiction/fantasy. That sounds about right, if a little broad. I'd like to drill down a little more, but I don't know if there's anything more specific than that. Alex is such a hodgepodge of genre elements. A little bit of everything I like.

I've also been thinking about my elevator pitch for Alex and, boy, that is that a tough one.

"It's a series about a private investigator who has a partner who's immortal and they investigator some supernatural cases, some science fiction cases. There's a bit of a time travel, clones and..."

As a opposed to the elevator pitch for RiH:

"Bounty hunters for the dead."

I feel like I learned a lot of stuff working on RiH and I just want to apply some of that to Alex. I want shape the Alex Cheradon series into the same kind of focused, streamlined model that RiH was/is.

Feel to chime in with your thoughts about the covers.

If you had to describe Alex Cheradon to your friends in one sentence, what would it be?