As the Creative Director of Orbit US, I am very happy to make some announcements and introductions. And maybe a few explanations, with a small peek behind the curtain at a book publishing art department. SFF readers are pretty opinionated about covers, which is awesome, so I’m guessing you’d like to know a little bit more about how an art dept. is set up.

When Orbit first launched here in the US three years ago, the cover design was handled by the fabulous Art Directors and Designers of the Little Brown Art Department (some of their awesome work can be pointed out in my very first ever Orbit blog post here.) Orbit’s first year in the US went so swimmingly that it jumped out from under the Little Brown umbrella and teamed up with Yen Press to become it’s own division of Hachette Books. It then needed its own art department and I was hired to get that moving. Kirk Behshoff, who you will meet in a minute, had already been handling the cover art for Yen Press while it was a part of Little Brown Young Readers, and thank goodness he came over with Yen or I might have lost my mind those first few weeks. So long story short, the last two years were a lot of wonderful covers mixed with panic and a lot of late nights, because let me tell you, two people for two imprints is a bit of an insane workload. And because of the time crunch, I stuck mostly to Orbit and Kirk stuck mostly to Yen.

But now we are three! As of the beginning of September, we have welcomed Wendy Chan onto the Orbit/Yen team as a Junior Designer. With Wendy’s help we’ve been able to start to mix it up a bit. I did my very first Yen covers (for the High School of the Dead series) and Kirk is handling some Orbit covers—the first of which, Leviathan Wakes, is launching today! Very exciting.

(more…)