Book Progress: Initial Cover Concepts

Cover design temperature check

A door has been opened that my mind refuses to shut. 🚪

In a previous post, I mentioned shifting my focus to getting my collection of dark fiction and poems revolving around the concept of death, and how we handle it, into your hands by Oct 1, 2026.

Prices kept adding up the further down the rabbit hole I went. It all became overwhelming, but I’ll save that breakdown for another behind-the-scenes.

When I start an initiative that feels complex and makes my brain feel like spaghetti, I tend to revert to project management. So I plotted out every story in the collection, allocated length, and set deadlines for drafting, editing, and finalizing each one.

I simulated the total income and expenses of producing this book, as an MBA student should, and realized it was bound to be a massive loss, even if it did well for a debut.

Time to cut costs. 🪓

I’m not a visual designer, but I do have the tools and enough design sense as a UX designer to give it a shot.

So I whipped out the dusty iPad and started sketching out some ideas.

The concept I set was about “opening the door to death,” and went from there.

Here was the first sloppy attempt. Cool, but a little too splatterpunk for the vibes. Could always use this vibe for a future project.

Then I decided to make it a little more booklike to see if the creature could actually work as a cover.

I personally fucking loved this, but still not the vibe for the collection. I’ll use it later, but the keyhole… there’s something there.

At this point, I had a clear idea of where I wanted it to go and used Figma to move toward high-fidelity mockups. I had to visualize it before I decided to cut out a professional cover designer completely.

Here’s the result