Cover Designer Spotlight: Spiridon Giannakis

A good cover changes everything. It is the first thing a reader sees, and for a debut author without the backing of a traditional publishing house, it creates a challenge. It has to live up to the customer's high expectations, has to entice them, intrigue them.

To get a better idea of what I wanted in a cover, I spent countless weekends in bookstores and libraries. I took photos of tables and shelves, studied how fantasy books are laid out, and flipped to copyright pages to find the names of the designers. What struck me was how similar most of them looked. Different titles, different artwork, but the same visual language repeated over and over. I wanted something different. I loved the classic, iconic 1970s mass-market covers that felt like a movie poster. Was there a way for an updated version? Something equally iconic but contemporary? As I searched, I struggled to find cover designers with portfolios showing they could think outside of the box like that. In the end, I was, honestly, getting a little desperate.

Eventually, it occurred to me to ask Greg Rutkowski for advice. And Greg promptly pointed me to Spiridon Giannakis.

The Right Kind of Designer

Spiridon is a German designer and publisher who has spent most of his career working on art books. He has designed countless books, many of them for publishers like Editions Caurette and for artists whose names carry real weight in the illustration world: Kim Jung Gi, Abigail Larson, Björn Hurri, Even Mehl Amundsen. He is, in other words, not a cookie-cutter book designer. He is a designer who lives inside art.

And he turned out to be perfect for the job. Our first call was high energy from the start. Spiridon is outspoken, passionate, and extremely direct. He has opinions about everything, and he is not afraid to share them. On that first call we talked about Greg's and Roberto's art work, typography, and our frustration with boring book covers.

One moment from that call stuck with me. Previously, I had worked with Roberto on an illustration specifically for the cover. We went through over a dozen different ideas until we landed on one we both loved. But when I tinkered with Photoshop in a desperate attempt to design a cover myself, I struggled and eventually gave up on it. I decided one of his underground cavern illustrations would be a better fit. But when I showed Roberto's images to Spiridon, he stopped on the one I had set aside. "This is the one," he said. I had serious doubts, but I told him if he could make it work, I'd be excited.

Making It Work

A few weeks later, the first draft arrived. He had moved things around, simplified it, and found the perfect typography. The transformation was amazing. It looked nothing like any fantasy book cover I had ever seen. It was bold and clean, working in three colors that felt both modern and retro at the same time. The job of the cover is to make someone pick up this book instead of the one next to it. That was the goal, and Spiridon's cover delivered.

Iterating and tweaking it after that first draft was quick and easy. Spiridon's instincts were consistently good. His art-book background shows in every change.

A Case for Self-Publishing

There is one more thing I want to say about this collaboration: a cover like this would almost certainly never have been approved for an unknown debut author at one of the big publishing houses. It is too bold, too unconventional, too far from the template. Self-publishing is hard in a hundred small ways, but it comes with one very real gift: the freedom to pick your collaborators and to be as bold as you want to be. Working with Spiridon on this cover was one of the moments when that gift felt most concrete to me. Something unique and special was created here.

Spiridon is a passionate guy. He loves art, he loves art books, and he is not afraid to experiment, to challenge convention. That is what he brought to Eden's Rise, and I am grateful for it.

You can see more of his work on his website.

The final cover will be revealed when pre-ordering becomes available this summer.