Book Cover and Book Design by David Pascal Ghostwriting Services

Client:
David Pascal

As both a writer and a designer, there’s probably no project in the world I like doing more than designing book covers.

I’ve done it for private clients, for academic clients, for local firms and global print publishers. I’ve worked with print-on-demand publishing houses like Amazon’s Createspace and Lulu, for Kindle and Nook, and I’ve done it for Fortune 500 companies and award-winning poets.

Sometime I’ve even done the cover first and then written the text myself! In the case of the cover on the left, I originally came up with the image in order to use it for a flyer publicizing a course on writer’s block that I was giving. But the course inspired a book I’m currently revising.

Below are some recent (and a few not-so-recent) book covers that I’ve done. Have a look.

And if you’re wondering if I’m available to do a book cover for you personally — I’m always available to do a book cover. (Though maybe not always right away. But I welcome inquiries.)

Contact me to find out more.

Client:
Author Frank J. Edwards, M.D.

Frank J. Edwards is the author of three five-star rated medical thrillers, and is the next Robin Cook. I had the privilege of publishing his first two novels in the Jack Forester series, Final Mercy and Reap, and also designed the cover for his most recent book of poetry, The Problem With Zero.

Client:
The Bronx County Historical Society

This cover was for the Bronx County Historical Society.

This cover was a challenge because one and the same cover was to be used for a very wide range of historical titles relating to the Bronx.

Eventually we settled on an evocative old 1882 print that seemed to catch the essence of the place. With just a little image modification, classics like The New Parks Beyond The Harlem, seen above, just rolled off the presses.

Client:
McMaster University

The cover below was created for one of Canada’s finest colleges: McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

It was for a University Library project to reprint classic editions, and it’s particular favorite of mine, because the first book in the series was H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, the first book I ever read.

The project was interesting too because it involved making another series cover — a cover that can serve as the book jacket for every book in the series. And the scholarly series that might emerge from McMaster University Library’s extraordinarily rich selection of books was immense.

If you can imagine designing a cover that can fit Newton’s Principia, Dracula, and Winnie The Pooh, you begin to see the challenge.

Fortunately McMaster is a beautiful university — full of green boughs, noble naves, and scholarly ivies. A photo of one of their doorways, suitably photoshop’d to a give it a watercolor feel, atop a stately Trajan font, provided a solution.

Client:
r-spec

The next cover was commissioned by r-spec, a writer’s group working in conjunction with Big Pencil Press. The idea was to take a major Northeastern American city and give eighteen fictional treatments of what that urban future might be. An interesting project, with implications for every city in the globe.

This became something of a pet project with me, and I ended up designing not only a series of variant covers that were very different from the final pick, but also laying out the whole book. Below are three of the rejected covers (which I kind of liked).

Client:
Kirtas Technologies

Below are a few covers for the Kirtas Classics Series.

Kirtas Technologies — at the time they hired me — was a firm that spearheaded the use of automation in book digitization.

Their digitization devices could capture digital images from bound documents with a speed and quality unmatched by any other equipment. Their clients included universities, libraries, governments, publishers, and institutions ranging from Microsoft to the British Library to Moscow University to Yale to the Library of Congress itself.

So when the firm liked my work on their web site and decided to make me Graphic Designer, one of my first glorious tasks was to create their own line of classic publications.

The initial covers were designed to be generic; that is, one cover was intended to serve as the jacket for various books in the same general subject area — history, art, classics, and so on. Here are a few of the first templates I created. The first template (above) was for books related to the arts. The cover below is for the Culinary Series:

The next three below were for the Civil War Series:

Client:
Requests Privacy

A long story behind this one, as you might expect with anything originating from the former Soviet bloc!

This jacket was originally for a book regarded as something of a mix between espionage fiction and experimental literary fiction by a poet and author with East German roots. This first cover led to a few more, but so far the books aren’t on the book shelves yet.

Client:
Rochester Poetry Group

“The days run away like wild horses over the hills…”

After I had given a talk to writer’s group in Rochester, New York, someone suggested that it would be nice to get a selection of Rochester poets together and do a print anthology. I agreed. Eons passed.

Then while talking to another local poet suddenly the idea of the cover to the left hit me, and before I knew it I had come up with the cover and saved it to disk. …And that’s where it sits to this day.

(By the way. The title lines? By Charles Bukowski, of course.)

Client:
Toronto University

I had gotten an assignment to do covers for a series of classics for Toronto University, and I assumed each classic would have it’s own jacket. So I started with a few variations on War And Peace. Unfortunately the client decided to go with one generic cover for all, and my Napoleon covers encountered Waterloo.

Client:
Various Individuals

Fragebogen. A German author’s memoir of World War I and World War II.

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