A book cover is a promise. Before anyone reads a single page or meets your characters, they see an image and decide if your world is worth stepping into. I think about that a lot. Every cover in the Mythroot catalog was made with that in mind, and I want to talk about what actually went into them.
Treenosphere: The World Below
The Treenosphere covers were the first ones I ever worked on, and honestly, they were the hardest. The world they show doesn't look like anything you've seen before. A massive underground network of roots and elemental energy, alive and ancient and completely alien. The colors had to feel earthy but also somehow luminous. Green and gold, like sunlight coming through a canopy that has no business existing underground.
Aiden is at the center of all three covers but his posture tells a different story each time. In The Eerie World of Treenosphere, he's looking down, discovering something for the first time. In The Preternatural World, he's looking outward, starting to understand what he's part of. And in The Forbidden World, he's looking up. What he sees above him is the surface world, and for the first time it's the surface that looks strange.
These covers taught me everything I know about visual storytelling. Every mistake I made here shaped how I approached the series that came after.
Ember Tides: Fire Meets Water
After Treenosphere I had a much better sense of what I was doing. The Ember Tides series takes place on a volcanic island where fire and ocean are constantly colliding, so the palette had to live in that tension. Warm amber against deep teal. Smoke and salt. The Drowning Fire sets the whole tone: a boy standing at the edge of the water with a volcano rising behind him and embers glowing beneath the surface. That single image captures what the entire first book feels like. Standing at the edge of something enormous and choosing not to turn back.
As the series goes on the covers shift. The colors get deeper and heavier. By The Last Tide the warmth has burned away and what's left is just the weight of everything that's happened across six books. I wanted someone looking at the full set on a shelf to see a story even in the spines.
Veilstorm: Shattered Light
Talia's world is built on glass and crystal. Frequencies and light bending through things. The Veilstorm covers needed to feel completely different from the first two series. Cooler, more delicate, with this sense that everything beautiful on the page could break at any moment. Bound in Glass shows a figure surrounded by crystalline structures with light scattering everywhere. There's wonder there but also this feeling that none of it is going to last.
All That Shatters follows through on that. The final cover in the trilogy is the most stripped down thing in the whole catalog. By the end of Talia's story the ornamentation is gone. What's left is just what was always underneath.
The Process
I don't start with an image. I start with a feeling. What does this book feel like in a reader's chest when they close it? That becomes the starting point. Color palette comes next, then composition, then round after round of revision until the image actually earns the story it's sitting in front of.
I don't hand the vision off to someone else. The covers come from the same place as the words. Late nights, reference images pinned to every surface in my office, and the stubborn belief that a reader deserves to know what kind of world they're walking into before they open the book.
A cover should feel like the first sentence of the story. Honest and immediate and impossible to walk away from.
That's what I hold every cover to. And every one that comes next will be held to the same thing.