New Covers for the Treenosphere Trilogy

I went back to the beginning.

Treenosphere was the first series I ever finished. The Eerie World, The Preternatural World, The Forbidden World. Three books about Aiden Tillman and a network of roots older than anything walking on the surface. Those books are the reason Mythroot exists. Without them I never would have learned that I could finish a trilogy, let alone build a publishing company around the kind of stories I wanted to tell.

And the covers were not holding up.

Why Now

I just finished launching the Elementari Series. Six books, six covers, a visual language I spent months refining until every piece of art felt like it belonged on the same shelf. Somewhere around cover four of that series I started noticing something. The bar I was holding the new work to was a lot higher than the bar the old work had cleared. That gap was bothering me.

The Treenosphere covers were not bad. They were the best I could make at the time. But the time they came from was a long way back, before I understood what a cover is supposed to do. A cover is the first sentence of the book. If the first sentence has aged out of the rest of the catalog, you owe the readers a rewrite.

So I went back into the studio.

The Eerie World of Treenosphere

Book one. Aiden's first descent. The new cover holds the moment he realizes the ground is not what he thought it was. Roots and stone, light bleeding through from somewhere deep, that exact instant where curiosity turns into something heavier. The old cover hinted at a world below. The new one makes you feel the pull of it.

The Preternatural World of Treenosphere

Book two. Things stop being strange and start being personal. The middle book of any trilogy is the hardest one to put a face on, because it's the book where the rules change. The new cover leans into that. Familiar shapes from book one, but turned. Lit differently. The kind of image that makes you look twice and then a third time.

The Forbidden World of Treenosphere

Book three. The end of the road. The one Aiden does not get to walk away from the same person he started as. The new cover for this one carries the most weight, and it should. Everything the trilogy has been building toward sits in this image. I wanted a reader holding the three books in order to feel a story unfold across the spines as much as inside them.

What I Brought Back With Me

Six books of Elementari taught me a lot of things I did not know when I made the original Treenosphere covers. How light moves on a portrait cover at thumbnail size. Where to spend detail and where to hold back. How to give a series a shared identity without making every cover look like the same image with a different filter. Restraint, mostly. The kind that's almost impossible to learn the first time you make a cover, because the first time you make a cover you want to put everything you love into it.

The new Treenosphere covers carry that lesson. They are quieter than the originals in the places that needed quiet, and louder in the places that needed weight. They sit next to the Elementari, Ember Tides, and Veilstorm covers without flinching. That was the bar.

Why Going Back Matters

Here is the thing I want to say plainly. Mythroot is not a catalog I plan to set down and walk away from. The work I am doing now is going to teach me things I do not know yet, and the work I am doing five years from now will be better than the work I am doing today. When that happens, I will come back. I will look at the covers, the formatting, the metadata, the descriptions, and I will redo the parts that no longer hold up.

Readers who picked up Treenosphere five years ago, two years ago, last month, deserve to feel like the books they bought are still being cared for. Indie publishing gets a reputation for being a thing you do once and abandon. That is not the Mythroot I am building. The catalog is alive. It moves with the craft.

Side by Side

Here they are next to the originals. Same trilogy, the way it looked then and the way it looks now.

If a cover from your old catalog cannot stand next to the cover from your new one, you have a job to do. So you do it.

The new Treenosphere covers are live on the homepage now. If you have read the trilogy already, thank you for being here from before any of this looked the way it does today. If you have not, this is a pretty good moment to start. The story underneath has not changed. The face it wears just caught up to it.

More coming. Always more coming.