When Following the Rules Doesn’t Fit

When I first published Asrian Skies all the way back in 2017, I had this vague, persistent discomfort that I couldn’t quite put into words—just a low-level sense that something about the way the series looked, the way it was packaged and presented to the world, wasn’t telling the truth of what was actually inside.

It wasn’t the story. I’ve always loved the story—its quiet strength, its slow unraveling, its refusal to conform to the louder, faster rhythms of what most people expect from space opera. Avery isn’t a blaster-wielding hero. She doesn’t punch first or throw out sarcastic one-liners in the middle of a firefight. She survives. She carries weight. Her power isn’t in the spectacle but in the subtlety. And that, it turns out, is a harder thing to capture on a book cover than anyone ever tells you.

Back then, I didn’t know what the problem was. I only knew that everyone around me seemed to agree that I needed a certain kind of look. Something loud, slick, with ships or with a stoic, armor-clad woman staring down the reader like she’s about to burn the galaxy to the ground. I was told, over and over again, that genre fiction needed to signal the genre. I mean, duh, right?

And if it was character-driven, that was fine, but you needed to signal that with a weapon-wielding flashy character on the cover. That it couldn’t be too different from everything else out there. That people don’t know what to expect unless you make it obvious.

Then one day, in casual conversation, a writer/editor/friend said something that cracked it open for me: “Well, of course not—you’re writing upmarket.”

That one sentence changed everything.

Suddenly I understood why none of the cover advice had ever worked (and, uh, craft advice in general, but that’s another six or ten blog posts). Now I could see it—my stories weren’t typical genre fiction. They were character-driven, emotionally complex, morally messy, focused on pretty prose and beautiful sentences, slow-paced, and far more interested in why things happen than in what happens next. And once I saw it, once I understood that I was writing in a space that didn’t have the same visual language as the books everyone was pointing me toward, I realized I had to stop trying to make my series look like something it wasn’t.

So after a few false starts with several brilliant artists who were amazing at their craft but just too experienced in commercial sci-fi to understand what I was needing, I did something you’re not supposed to do.

I opened Canva and started from scratch—not because I thought I could do it better than the professionals, but because I finally understood that no one else could do it right until I understood what right looked like.

And what I ended up with breaks all the rules.

My current version couldn’t be more different from KU sci-fi covers. The typography isn’t even centered, for crying out loud—unheard of in commercial fiction, but super common in upmarket. They don’t look like space opera. They don’t pop in thumbnails. They’re quiet, atmospheric, reflective. They were made for readers who don’t need to be shouted at.

(Just to be clear—breaking the rules doesn’t mean abandoning professionalism. These covers might not follow traditional sci-fi marketing templates, but good design still matters. Typography still matters. Mood and tone still matter. This wasn’t me throwing random fonts and overlays into Canva and calling it a day—it was intentional choices about composition, restraint, and tone.

You can absolutely break the rules of genre. But you shouldn’t break the rules of good design.)

What I ultimately ended up with? They’re not perfect. Of course they’re not. I’m not a designer, and I don’t pretend to be. But they do speak in a way that finally feels honest.

So, no more trying to wedge my series into a genre-shaped box. Shadows of War is what it is: upmarket sci-fi with emotional depth, political complexity, quiet power, and a whole lot of broken people trying to do better.

It took me a long time and more than a few wrong turns to get here—but I’m finally proud of what this series looks like on the outside. And while it may never bring in tons of new readers, it won’t be bringing in legions of the wrong ones anymore. And sometimes that’s the best marketing we can do.