I’m trying to be more excited than overwhelmed at the thought of all that will need to go into my second edition of the Herezoth trilogy, starting with “The Crimson League,” the first installment.

I’m beginning to consider what I might want the cover to look like. While I’ll be outsourcing the design itself, I’ll need to give the designer some instruction of what I want. And there are various possibilities.

Given the name of the book, a red theme is a given. Red must at least be incorporated in some way. And I’ve been thinking how to go about that. There are various option.

• COAT OF ARMS. There is a particular, and important, coat of arms in the novel that it could be fun to use on the cover somehow. I don’t know if the coat of arms by itself would scream “fantasy novel” or “sword and sorcery,” which is needed.
• SETTING. The Hall of Sorcery or the Crystal Palace jump immediately to mind considering a particular place to depict in the cover design.
• TRIANGLES. The sorcerer’s mark is a triangular birth mark. So triangles are important.
• KORA’S RUBY AND CHAIN. The protagonist has a ruby and chain of red gold that also feature prominently. What’s nice about that is… red. To go with the title.
• SWORDS, BOWS, DAGGERS. There are lots of those, given the magical civil war the characters fight in.

I’ll have to mull things over. In the meantime, what do you think when you think of the cover to a fantasy novel?