Diana Gill talked about her favorite covers at the Eos blog the other day, and Lou Anders has been talking about cover art both at Pyr-o-mania and his personal blog. (I think this current flurry of talking about cover art can be traced back to Irene Gallo's blog, which is getting lots of us thinking about the art we like and the art that sells books, and the intersection of the two.)

For myself, my favorite cover that I've been involved with recently is the gorgeous Todd Lockwood wraparound art on Naomi Novik's Temeraire. (It's not on Todd's site, so I'll try to remember to addd it to this entry when I'm back at work on Monday -- I think I have it on my hard drive there. You can also check out the bookshot on the SFBC site, but it's quite small, and you can't see the back.) That was one of those few cases where I had an idea in my head of what the jacket should look like, and the artist had not only the same idea, but did it even better than I expected.

(A close second in the same category is Daniel Dos Santos's cover for our Jim Butcher omnibus Wizard at Large, where I told the art director "There's a zombie T. Rex in this book. I'm not saying the artist has to paint it, but I bet he'll want to, and it would make a great cover.")

One last cover I have to mention is Ron Walotsky's for The First Chronicles of Amber, a number of years ago. I first read Roger Zelazny's science fantasy series as a very impressionable ten-year-old, and I imprinted hard on the very evocative Walotsky covers those books had in the mid-'70s. (Black background, small, gem-like art in the middle and big white lower-case type around it.) So, when I stuck those books all into one volume for the SFBC, I had to get Ron to do the art. Luckily, he was free, and it came out like this:

Edit, 9/18/06 @ 12:30: Irene Gallo let Todd Lockwood know about this post, and the Temeraire art is now up on his site. (He's also selling prints of it, which I expect will be popular -- it's a great picture.) And that's good, because what I have is just a PDF of the jacket (with type and everything), not the art as itself. Similarly, I only have a PDF of Wizard At Large.