For months, I searched for the perfect cover artist for Pluto’s Revenge.
I looked through portfolios. I contacted designers. I saved examples of covers I admired. I revised my vision over and over, convinced that somewhere out there was an artist who could create exactly what I had in mind.
The problem was that I wasn’t entirely sure what that vision was.
Every time I found a cover artist whose work I liked, I would second-guess myself. Maybe the cover should be more realistic. Maybe it should be more illustrative or cinematic.
The search went on for months.
Eventually, I started designing my own cover.
At first, it was only supposed to be a placeholder—an illustration to communicate my ideas to a professional illustrator. But the more I worked on it, the more it became something else.
I changed direction and started working on a photorealistic version.
I started by painting a planet. A place Novan dreamed of reaching perhaps. I set up a camera and took photographs.
Then I put on a snowsuit and grabbed my guitar. I became Novan.
Next I built a miniature landscape of Pluto’s surface and photographed it.
For the stars I thought about using a stock photo. But then I remembered our trip to Dubois, Wyoming. The dark sky was the most stars I had ever seen. I used my photo. It added a personal element to the cover. A memory.
I kept adding elements. I decided the guitar case needed stickers. I designed them and wrote them into Novan’s story. Piece by piece, the cover came together.
Then I looked for cover artists again.
I kept working in the meantime, redesigning over and over. Second guessing.
And then I looked again for cover artists.
Months passed.
Finally I heard back from one of the artists I most admired. His work was exactly the kind of science fiction art that had inspired me during my search.
His next availability was October. My publication target was August 24. The twentieth anniversary of Pluto’s demotion from planetary status.
For a brief moment, I considered delaying publication, but when would I have the chance again to publish on the anniversary. The event that inspired the whole book.
Then something occurred to me. The problem was never the cover. The problem was that I was waiting for perfection. The cover wasn’t perfect. And it never would be.
What surprised me was how closely that realization mirrored the journey of Novan.
Throughout the novel, Novan struggles with expectations, failure, and the uncomfortable reality that life rarely unfolds according to plan. He wants certainty. He wants control. He wants things to make sense.
Instead, he gets something far messier.
Growth.
Not because everything works out, but because he learns to move forward despite uncertainty.
In a strange way, creating this book taught me the same lesson.
I started out searching for the perfect cover.
What I found instead was a cover that told the story I wanted to tell.
A lone traveler crossing Pluto with a guitar case in hand.
A little imperfect.
A little unusual.
But undeniably mine.
Maybe someday I’ll commission a new edition from one of the talented artists whose work inspired me.
Maybe the cover will evolve.
But the lesson won’t.
Creative work is never finished because it becomes perfect.
It becomes finished because at some point we choose to let it go.
And on August 24, twenty years after Pluto lost its status as a planet, I’ll finally let this story begin its own journey.