Book View Café has issued quite a number of anthologies and multi-author collections over the years. It’s only natural that a group made up of so many members would from time to time offer a cornucopia to the book-buying public. One endeavor went beyond the typical choices of either a “best of BVC” sampler or a theme anthology, and that was something we called The Shadow Conspiracy. This was a team effort requiring a particularly dedicated team effort — a shared-world project made up of works that all fit within a unified fictional milieu, a la Thieves World or George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series.
The premise: Early in the Industrial Revolution, steam-powered automatons were created. They became so numerous they constituted a new servant class — and in the case of the Southern states, a new slave class. The major moral dilemma? The automatons weren’t just machines. They were sentient beings. They had consciousnesses — and depending on who was asked, souls.
Obviously we were working in a steampunk mode, but since each contribution was a story in itself, not a chapter in a rigidly-constructed narrative, the parameters were wide. One author could do a romance. Another could keep to a literary theme. Another could use the premise as a metaphor to comment on actual history. The creativity was in full flower. Two volumes were put together early in the existence of the co-op. In 2015, people wanted to do a third volume, one that would focus upon the Civil War. The individual book title was Clockwork Souls.
I chose not to write a story for the volume, but I wanted to do my part. The solution was that I do the cover. You see the result here:
What you don’t see is the damn obstacles I met along the way to that final artwork and design. I didn’t expect the process to become so challenging. To my mind, the right sort of cover was obvious. All I needed to do was combine a picture that evoked the Civil War with a picture that evoked clockwork.
I went looking for the former sort of image and within a fraction of an hour, found precisely what I wanted. The photo showed a man in a Union Army uniform on a horse, surveying a field. We can’t see bodies or cannons or flags, but the inference is absolutely an 1860s battlefield after the fighting is done. The man’s head is tilted down. The horse’s head is tilted down. The treeline in the distance is misty, out-of-focus, and somber. You can almost hear the soldier thinking to himself, “I’ve just been through hell.”
I wish I could show you that image. I can’t. What I had found was a photograph by renowned Joseph Sohm. He’s not just a photographer. He’s one of Those Guys. For example, he has served as one of the handful of people designated to create the official photographic portraits of U.S. presidents, and has visited the White House many times in order to fulfill those assignments. I had found the image in a listing that purported to be of pics that could be licensed inexpensively for use as an ebook cover. It was however mis-categorized. Sohm was offering the work only for so-called “editorial purposes,” which is to say, if someone wanted to use it to adorn a blog entry, that was okay, if one coughed up an amount of money that was a heckuva lot more than a normal fellow would want to pay just to make an individual blog entry pretty. Certainly it was an amount of money I won’t spent now even for this blog entry you are reading. The higher amount, for the ebook-cover rights? Forgettabouddit.
The devil of it was, now I had a standard in mind. I wanted an image that had something approaching the power Sohm’s had possessed. So I resumed searching.
What a nightmare. Normally when I look for images on, say, Dreamstime or Depositphotos, I am combing through stock photographs uploaded by individuals who understand the business model. They offer images cheaply to customers with limited budgets and try not to be pains in the ass when it comes to the licensing angle, figuring they’ll make their nut by appealing to a large number of customers. What I found was that the sites were replete with photo after photo after photo uploaded by Civil War reenactment enthusiasts of their get-togethers, and time after time after time, the only rights they were offering were the sort I’ve already described, i.e. “editorial purposes only” to be used as part of blogs or newsletter articles. The photographers weren’t looking for customers for their pics; they were letting fans like themselves see what had gone on at events they’d missed.
I thought I had caught a break when one of the fiction contributors to Clockwork Souls said she had a friend who was a frequent participant in Civil War reenactments. He quickly agreed to take some photos at such an event, which he was due to attend within a matter of days.
I could show you the results, but I don’t want to open the poor guy up to a litany of the many reasons why his attempts were of no use to me. I can boil it down like this: What Joe Sohm had done was create art. In terms of photography, art can be defined as the creation of an image that conveys meaning. Without that aspect, the image is just a bit of visual documentation of what was in front of the camera at the moment the shutter was clicked. And the latter was what I received. If I’d received, say, a photo of two soldiers kneeling on a battlefield that effectively portrayed comrades trying to cope with the loss that day of half their regiment, that I could have worked with. But what I got was, “two 21st Century guys at a Civil War reenactment posing for their buddy with a camera.”
The cooperative spirit was appreciated, but I couldn’t compromise. I wanted to end up with a cover I was proud of. I went back to searching, and finally found this:
This one told a story. Yes, the guy happens to have posed at a Civil War reenactment, but it feels like a glimpse of an actual Civil War soldier. Once I added a flicker of sunlight on the saber, it had the in-the-moment quality I was looking for.
Then there was the clockwork angle. Many views to choose from. I found this:
And then combined the two, yielding the result you see in the completed cover.
I have to say, the process may have been a struggle, but in the end, what I had was a favorite among all the book covers I’ve ever done. I only wish it had enjoyed a longer life. The contracts for Clockwork Souls ran for a five-year term. By the time that period expired, a number of the contributors were no longer members of BVC, and given that it was clear there would be no continuation of the shared-world effort, it and the two earlier volumes volumes of The Shadow Conspiracy were declared out of print.(The photograph of the Civil War reenactment role-player is copyright Lightpainter/Dreamstime. The clockworks array image is copyright Cappan/Dreamstime. Used by agreement. Further use requires the permission of the rights holders.)
