Reading · Write More with Simon K Jones

Hopefully you’ve all seen Shane Bzdok’s excellent work on the new cover for The Mechanical Crown:

It’s been a long old road to get to that cover. About twenty years, by my count. You can check out the story itself here:

TMC is a project that has been rolling around inside my head since my early 20s, albeit in very different forms. It was technically the first manuscript I ever completed, way back in 2010. That version was very bad, but it was an important milestone regardless.

During that initial draft’s development I printed a bunch of different work-in-progress paperbacks, mostly as an exercise in ego-boosting. Here’s what the first one looked like:

Look at those day-glo colours. The strange perspective. The incompetent linework. The disastrous typography.

You’ll note there’s a different title. It’s called Evinden because in 2006 I hadn’t yet worked out that naming stories after entirely fictional things is generally a bad idea. That name stuck for quite a while.

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In 2007 I did two new versions. First there was this rather abstract gemstone/tooth/thing with some CG lightning:

It’s dramatic, to be sure. Check out that ring-bound edition! I think I had planned to make copious notes on the pages, hence going for a binding that could lie flat. Tellingly, there are no scrawled notes within this thing.

Then there was this attempt:

You can see me trying to evolve my initial sketch and entirely failing. My favourite part of this is the attempt to depict a city in the distance, with what looks far more like a bunch of London flats. Something like this:

Somehow, the typography has got worse. What part of my brain thought it was a good idea to make the text the same colour as the background, but with a strange texture applied and a naff drop-shadow? Come on, 2007-Simon, you could have done better.

Fast forward to 2010 when I finally completed the first draft. Yes, it took me about a decade of faffing about. I had no writing habit back then, and was still several years away from discovering my love of serial fiction. Here’s the completed book:

I’ve learned my lesson and eschewed a cover illustration altogether, opting instead for white text on black. It’s very Spinal Tap. I actually quite like it.

The manuscript went in a drawer until 2016 when I returned to the story and decided to serialise it on Wattpad. This required a ground-up rewrite, and I also needed a new cover to promote the serial. Here’s what it launched with:

Still called Evinden, although I soon realised that was a silly name for a story and came up with a new title, which has since stuck:

The stock image of the castle is of Mont-Saint-Michel in France, which looks like an actual fantasy castle:

To even conceive of building such a thing! Remarkable.

That black and white cover is the first time I introduced the idea of machinery and hidden gears beneath the ground. It’s a slightly more successful cover, I think, as a result of being metaphorical rather than trying to depict a realistic scene.

I then worked with someone on Wattpad who was offering covers for people. She came up with this photobashed image:

Castles, bridges, mountains, hidden machinery below ground. It’s got it all. The palette is far too brown and uniform, but it’s conceptually quite satisfying, I think. It feels like a typical fantasy book, so it does the job in that respect.

This was the cover that I used for the entire Wattpad run of The Mechanical Crown. In 2021 I moved away from Wattpad and started this newsletter using Substack’s tools. More on that decision here:

One final quirk of the Wattpad edition was when the platform contacted me to ask if I was interested in putting the book into their paywalled stories program. This meant that readers would need to pay to read the book — given Wattpad’s huge userbase and reach, this seemed like it could be an exciting opportunity. A stipulation of entering the program is that Wattpad’s own designers create brand new covers for your books, and this is what they came up with:

Somehow, even though this image was made prior to the emergence of Midjourney and ChatGPT, they managed to make a cover that looks AI-generated. A weirdly specific woman, who has nothing to do with the story, wearing a very generic crown (which is clearly not mechanical), a really gribbly background of floating islands, and some random gears thrown behind the title. I especially like the way the woman’s neck has an abrupt cut-off at the bottom of the first line of text.

Incidentally, they did a new cover for my other story, A Day of Faces, and it was even weirder:

Let’s not do a Freudian psychoanalysis of the person who put that together.

Anyway, back to TMC. Earlier this year I decided to re-publish the story via this newsletter, as most of you won’t be familiar with the previous version. I’m calling it the reforged edition as it’s getting a further redrafting: fixing issues, slimming it down in some places and bulking it up in others, and generally applying all the learnings from my last decade of writing.

To promote the upcoming serial I needed a cover, and this is what I ended up with:

I’m actually pretty pleased with this one. It’s certainly better than those awful covers I did back in the 2000s. The colour scheme is eye-catching, it’s got the castle on the hill, the gears below. There’s a hint of a face on the left side of the hill, as if the castle could be a crown.

If I’d stuck with this version, I think I’d have been happy. But an opportunity arose to work with Shane Bzdok that I couldn’t pass up. Which is how we got to the final cover:

The revealing of a crown from the teeth of the gears is a genius move. All credit to Shane for that one.

This was the first time I’d worked with a cover designer, having always gone the DIY route in the past. It required unlearning some of my assumptions, such as moving away from the ‘castle on the hill’ concept that repeats through so many of the earlier designs.

Something Shane has done is really tune in to the tone of the book, and especially the vibe of the reforged edition. It’s going to be a somewhat more mature story, a little darker than the 2016 Wattpad version that was much more YA-coded. Anyone who enjoyed Tales from the Triverse should feel right at home with the reforged version.

I’m going to be chatting with Shane in more detail about his cover tomorrow, and you can find details here. In the meantime check out his services here:

There’s value in showing a long, convoluted process. This has always been the case, and is why I’ve always been fascinated by behind-the-scenes details about any kind of creative endeavour, whether it be music, movies, books, games or anything else. Understanding how the final object came to exist helps us improve our own techniques.

Moreover, in the age of uncertainty that has been ushered in by AI, there is a pragmatic purpose behind revealing process. The existence of a ‘history’ evidences the work, and is an extra insight into the creator’s brain beyond the finished text.

Mostly, it’s about emphasising the long and winding road that leads to anything even vaguely decent. These things don’t magically appear fully-formed. To get to Shane’s excellent TMC cover required me going through twenty-six years of iterations on the book and its various DIY covers. For me to be able to afford Shane’s (reasonably priced) services depended upon me writing this newsletter for five years and building the support of paid subscribers. To reach the confidence to start my newsletter involved seven years writing on Wattpad and learning the craft.

Some things have to go through several stage of being a bit crap before they become good. The best ideas often start off as terrible ideas and need to be nurtured over time. There’s the saying that art is never finished, only abandoned, but there’s a counterpoint; art is only bad when it’s abandoned too soon. Keep working away at a drawing, or a manuscript, and it can transform into something entirely unexpected.

Reforging The Mechanical Crown cover

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