Rumbling and Roaring in the US...

Something else that has popped up to do...

When a UK book gets a US co-edition, we sometimes need to re-jig the cover layout slightly: often they want different blurb on the back, sometimes they even change the title (An Itch to Scratch is called Just The Thing in the US).

This is the the artwork for the US cover of my next book, Rumble Roar Dinosaur!, sequel to Gnash Gnaw Dinosaur!:

We just needed to tweak the back, altering the height of the horizon and flipping the little pteradon, which was originally flying in from the far left.

The Designer created the Rumble Roar Dinosaur! cover from bits of my various illustrations pasted together: very skillful stuff. The ankylosaurus looks like this on the inside of the book:

As you can see, the T. Rex was cut off and the tail flipped, all in Photoshop, then the trees were removed, so the plain grass and sky would make a better background to the title.

The rock with the little dinos comes from the illustration above, and the little dino with his tongue out was cut, flipped and pasted from this image:


The dragonfly has been borrowed from the diplodocus image in Gnash Gnaw Dinosaur!:


...and the little pteradon in the background is from my archaeopteryx spread:

The Designer sent me the tweaked US cover for approval. I can be a bit of a perfectionist with this stuff: I noticed the altered horizon had been created with a sharp edge, which didn't look right with all the soft pastel edges, and the sweep of the hill was not as even as I would have liked. So I asked them to email it across for me to fiddle with. I did it in the evening, so it didn't eat into my Bears time.

This is how the front cover looks with the text in place. It's due for publication in March and, like it's predecessor Gnash Gnaw Dinosaur!, has huge flaps on each page. Can't wait.