Doing It Scared

I’ve spent a huge amount of time since the start of 2026 working on book design for Shiraki Press, and while I’m immensely proud of these results, it’s also one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.

Before getting into publishing last year, I spent 20 years as a video game developer, alternating between engineering and design. I never considered myself an artist and I never got close to the visual art side of things... at least, not until I went indie and made Legacy of the Elder Star, and I commissioned all the art and animation for that game.

So how on Earth did I get into book design?

Testing the waters

I started by testing the waters with my own work, doing my own “covers” for my short fiction pieces in 2025. That way, if my visual art turned out to be terrible, at least it wouldn’t risk any of our authors’ books; it kept things low-stakes, allowing me to learn and experiment.

My first such cover was for Tribute:

Design-wise, this is so simple: just some photo-manipulated stock imagery and some thematic typography. I was largely figuring out my workflow from first principles and defining what it even meant for me to do graphic design at all.

I reached a little further for Witness:

Here I combined and layered multiple stock images with much more aggressive edits and a bolder approach to the type. This was a bit of boundary-testing, which was successful at pushing me outside my comfort zone, but I also feel like this one has aged less well as I’ve further developed my skills.

I felt my workflow start to solidify for When the Black Wind Blows:

For this one, I used a reference photo and vector tools to draw the lighthouse silhouette, and used a bunch of subtle layering and filters to achieve the rest of the render. This image went well beyond just composing stock images together, and became my first really intentionally creative piece.

Then I did We Are All Terrorists Now:

Going in, I had a much clearer visual idea in mind than for the prior covers, each of which had come together through a lot of painful trial-and-error. This time, I had a concept, I made a plan, and I executed on that plan. There were some pivots, but the intentionality I started to feel on my previous cover further crystallized here, into something resembling confidence.

My last personal piece for 2025 was The Gilded King:

This one made me feel like I was starting to “get it”. I knew exactly what I was looking for when searching for stock, and the edits I did for the crown were way more sophisticated than I would’ve even thought to attempt to learn back when I was doing Tribute.

This was not a long journey: it was just five images over seven months. But it was crucial to me developing the confidence I needed to tackle our projects for Shiraki Press.

Accelerated Growth Environment

The first real book I worked on was Lauren C. Teffeau’s Accelerated Growth Environment, a solarpunk eco-thriller. I wanted a fully-rendered image of the Climasphere—the awe-inspiring ecological super-structure on which the book is set—and I knew I’d need to commission an illustrator to execute that vision.

I put together a creative brief, gathering comparable covers and reference images to capture the vibe I was going for:

The cover for Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 in particular stood out to me as the right rendering style, color palette, and overall mood. That cover was illustrated by Stephan Martiniere, a Hugo Award-winning artist. I figured there was no way we’d be able to get someone like that to work on our first book, but I sent the email anyway (terrifying!) and fully expected a rejection.

Imagine my surprise when he said yes!

Stephan delivered the gorgeous front cover illustration for Accelerated Growth Environment, which so perfectly captures the Climasphere, but I still needed to do the title, the spine and back, and all the interior layout. And when it came to layering my own work on top of Stephan’s—my work, juxtaposed with that of a real artist?!—the impostor syndrome came on so strong. I had to grit my teeth and tell myself, “Self, you’re gonna have to do it scared.”

And so I did.

Wine for Roses

The second book I worked on was Emily O’Malley Liu’s debut Wine for Roses, a gardencore romantic fantasy set on a Victorian estate in the American Midwest. This cover needed to evoke all that ostentatious Victorian romance and also hit the “roses” theme aggressively, but it also needed to steer clear of the “Hallmark Valentine’s Day card” vibe, which is really easy to trip into as soon as there’s a rose involved at all.

Again, I put together a creative brief:

I kept pulling books with this kind of lush, full art style and discovering that most of them were done by Lisa Marie Pompilio. I looked her up and, again, thought, “There’s no way someone with this resume is going to respond to me.”

But she did! And she designed the perfect front cover for this book.

While I didn’t do the title type this time—Lisa integrated it directly into her art—the spine, back, and interior design were still on me, and that meant I needed to extend Lisa’s cover without ruining it.

In this case, I said, “Self, I know you’re still scared, but just keep it simple and you’ll be fine.”

The Color of Time

The third book I worked on was Millie Abecassis’s The Color of Time, a fairytale-inspired science-fantasy adventure. I conceived the concept for this cover to highlight the protagonist, Cyrelle, and her iconic snake-suit, and I could see the whole composition so clearly but, like with Accelerated Growth Environment, I knew I couldn’t illustrate that image myself.

So I made another creative brief, a process that by now has become comfortably familiar:

We had just been to Seattle Worldcon and attended a panel on cover design that included, among other folks, Alyssa Winans, who would go on to win a Hugo Award for her art later that weekend. Her work covers the spectrum of fantasy and science fiction and includes some of my favorite covers in recent memory—for Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle—and I was thinking about how rad it would be to get literally her to do this cover for us... but there was that voice again: “She’s a big deal, and you’re just some little indie publisher nobody’s heard of; she’s gonna say no.”

I sent the email anyway.

She said yes.

We even did a video call to kick this one off! (Protip: if you’re working in publishing and you’re not doing a kickoff call with your cover artist, you should be doing a kickoff call with your cover artist. It’s so massively helpful for getting everyone on the same page and building mutual excitement for the work.)

And the illustration she delivered is just stunning... but this was to be another case where the title, spine, back, and layout were on my plate, and again, I really didn’t want to ruin her incredible artwork with a ham-fisted title treatment.

If you’ve read this far, you know the drill by now: I did it scared.

Advertising

Running a publisher requires advertising our work, and that requires a ton of graphics customized to every context. The beautiful front covers do a lot of heavy lifting, but this is where I really had to embrace the graphic design work and stop, at long last, thinking of myself as “not an artist”.

I made ad graphics for the books themselves:

I made a “Spring 2026” ad, highlighting all the books together:

I even made a set of those trendy trope images:

With every image I make, the voice of my impostor syndrome quiets, and my confidence grows. I know I still have a ton to learn and a so much growth to do, but pushing through the fear and trying and asking and doing the work has brought me to a place where I’ve finally stopped telling myself “I’m not an artist”, and started embracing that, even in middle-age, I can still become new things.

You can just do things

I was dead sure all three of our incredibly accomplished cover artists were going to turn us down. I sent the emails anyway. They all said yes. And we have gorgeous books to show for it!

Yes, it matters that we were willing and able to spend professional money for professional results. It also matters that we did our research and approached prepared. The creative briefs helped enormously, I think, to establish the seriousness of our intent as well as a concrete creative vision. And lastly—and I believe this part is crucial—we gave the artists space and time to work.

Similarly, when I started making promotional graphics for the press, I had no idea how I was going to make them look... professional? Legitimate? And I did it anyway, and I kept doing the work until it started to feel right.

My impostor syndrome told me I’d never done this, and so I couldn’t do this. Over 20 years of working in video games, I’d assumed an identity that didn’t hold space for new things to be possible. I assumed I couldn’t work with talented people if I didn’t match their talents... which completely misses the point of working with people.

I didn’t get over the fear. What I got over was the idea that the fear was something that would ever go away. I finally embraced that the only way to do it was scared, and that realization has made the impossible happen, over and over again.

Preorder our books!

You can preorder all three of our Spring 2026 titles, in ebook and/or paperback, directly from Shiraki Press. And you should! They’re really good stories!