On my Patreon page, I’ve been putting up free posts about the new and improved cover art that we’re doing at WMG. You can find a number of posts, but I thought I’d share this one with you here. (I’ll be sharing the occasional Patreon post throughout 2026 and maybe beyond.) You can sign up there for free and get the free posts only. On the weekends, I also write a new business post, but you’ll have to go through a paywall for those. Here’s a long(ish) one on the history of the Alien Influences cover.
Alien Influences
We have a plethora of covers to choose from here, and I even missed one, because mine is in storage, and I can’t find a good example of it online.
So…Alien Influences. I wrote the novel as interconnected short stories originally because at that time I did not realize I wrote out of order. The stories were published in various places, got nominated for awards, and (I knew) needed to be threaded into a full novel.
At the time, I was being published first in England, through Orion Books’ imprint Millennium. There’s a lot of backstory here, some of which I was never privy to. I do know that the company was co-founded by Anthony Cheethem, who had been in British publishing since the mid-1960s. This company, which was founded in 1991, was the third company he had founded. The first two were acquired by major publishers in the UK for sums of money that I can’t find on a quick search.
Everyone I worked with at Millennium was enthusiastic. They all had a chip on their shoulder and something to prove. That they could build bestsellers? I have no idea. That they could publish good books that sold well? Possibly.
I do know this: I was never treated as well in traditional publishing as Millennium treated me.
They published my early fantasy novels and then they took a flyer with Alien Influences. I love the cover on the British hardcover, and they did a different version (which I can’t find easily) for the mass market paperback. There was also a trade edition.
The book hit number one on the bestseller list for the Times of London, got extremely well-reviewed, and became a Topic of Conversation, at least in UK fandom.
It had also sold to Bantam in the United States as part of a bigger deal. Then in the U.S., I lost my editor at least five times. (I have blocked the exact number.) Meaning I had five different editors before my first novel from Bantam came out. Someone—and god knows who—moved Alien Influences away from the Fey publications and then buried it.
It was the only non-romance book that I know of that has the 1990s hunk (blech) Fabio on the cover. This cover often gets featured in retrospectives on Fabio covers…and then ignored.
It is a truly, truly, truly awful cover.
I got the rights back to the book because it went out of print very quickly, despite the excellent overseas sales and the good reviews—including one in The New York Times.
When we started WMG, we published it as soon as we could. We had one ugly-ass cover on it for a nanosecond because at the time, there weren’t yet art sites. I’m not even showing you that one, which was designed in PowerPoint, using historical (pre-20th century) artwork.
I think it only showed up on Amazon for that nanosecond because there were no other markets at the time.
Then we hired locally in Lincoln City, and brought in someone who eventually proved to be a mistake.
We hurried to rebrand Alien Influences. The first cover, co-designed by Dean, has pretty good art and adequate branding.
For some unknown reason, the cover got redesigned around the time Dean and I moved to Las Vegas. I remember seeing the redesign after it was uploaded to all the sites. I do not remember being consulted on any of the redesign.
The most charitable thing I can say about the artwork itself is that it looks like a Richard Powers imitation. I loathe most of Powers’ work, so this is not a compliment.
Still, the name is more-or-less properly branded and the pull quote is good. Maybe if I liked the art, we might have made it pass muster.
But why would we do that? It doesn’t look like modern science fiction at all. I see nothing here that would get a reader in 2026 to buy it and, in fact, I see two different things that would turn the reader off.
The first is that art. Blech, yuck, icky.
The second is the award I was nominated for. Back in the 1990s, the U.K.’s Arthur C. Clarke award was prestigious as hell. Maybe it still is, because it exists. But, the man was credibly accused of pedophilia, and there is a lot that I know about him because I was close to people who ran sf conventions. After the year 2000 or so, he was never invited to a U.S. sf convention again. (That I know of.)
I don’t want the association. We took that off my book cover this time. We put the best quote on the book, the one from The New York Times, not one from PW that sounds literary. (Yes, I find it ironic that the Times was the least literary review.)
I was the one to suggest rebranding and redesigning Alien Influences right away in our quest to brand everything properly. Now we have a cover I like. I believe this cover will entice readers to take a look, much more than the previous cover.
This book has had an interesting and weird history. I’m pleased it’s getting the kind of design it hasn’t had since it was introduced in the U.K. decades ago.
And right now, remember, we’re doing a Kickstarter on this and two other books. Broken Windchimes, which is also rebranded (and which I blogged about last week), and a short story collection that I will blog about on my Patreon page on Monday or so.
Oh, Kris, this new cover is outstandingly beautiful! Just WOW. Quite an improvement over the Fabio cover, which is the one in my personal library!