My First Book Cover

A few weeks ago, I received my advance copies from Bloomsbury of 'The Cardturner' by Loius Sachar, which I have done the cover for. In all the excitement of seeing my first ever book cover published, I forgot to post any pictures.

The idea was to create something like the design on the back of a playing card, with elements from the story turned into symbols in each corner, instead of the traditional hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds. I created a kind of road map pattern for the rest of the design, again in reference to the story (click the picture to see the detail better).

The book will be available in two different colours, like a blue deck of cards and a red deck of cards. Below is the back cover which I designed to look like the ace of spades. This is not in reference to the track by the band 'Motorhead'. I tried to work in a few more story elements into the pattern, can you see a compass and a car wheel?

Im very happy with the final thing, its really exciting to finally see some of the work I've been doing over the last year finished, printed and ready to show about. Im really looking forward to seeing it in the shops. The book is released on June 1st here in the UK (heres the amazon link). I'll put up some better pictures once the book is out properly.

One detail Im particularly happy with is this, my actual name, in actual print, on an actual published book! whoop!