📚 Designing the Cover of Empire, Nevada
Creating the cover for Empire, Nevada was its own journey — just like the story inside.
I didn’t want something generic. I wanted the cover to feel like the book — lonely, strange, nostalgic, and a little haunted. It started with a rough concept: a desert town vanishing into memory, a road that led nowhere, a truck with bikes strapped to the back, and a koi-shaped cloud drifting across the sky. We went through multiple color versions, fonts, and visual styles before I realized what it really needed: black-and-white. Textured. Detailed. Etched into time.
So we built it like that.
An old-school illustrated style — like a story pulled from a forgotten atlas or a ghost town’s local paper.
We simplified the text. Cleaned up the lines. Made space for the quiet.
The final version includes everything I love about the book: the desert, the emptiness, the surreal touches, and a deep emotional weight beneath it all. It’s not just a cover. It’s a portal into Paul’s world.
For more on the story:
👉 https://empirenevadathenovel.wordpress.com
iterate, iterate, iterate...
That’s what I do. Try things over and over again, digging down on what works and leaving behind what doesn’t until I have something I am happy with.
I have been working on cover ideas for Empire, Nevada before the first words were locked on the screen.
I keep chugging away at an idea until I get something I think works.
Sometimes, I get something totally unexpected. Sometimes I get total disappointment. Often, I get frustratingly close and have to dig down to get it JUST right.
Many of the ideas I’m working with right now have been living in my head for years. Some of them have been waiting in the dark so long, they practically exploded the moment I gave them space. That’s why you’re seeing such a massive output from me lately — it’s not that I’m suddenly overflowing with genius. It’s just that the dam finally broke.
It probably isn’t sustainable. At some point, I’ll have to slow down, start pacing things out, trickling content instead of dropping whole chapters, whole projects, at once. But for now, it’s all coming out fast and raw and real. Because it needs to.
And I think that’s okay. Sometimes the work demands a rush — a season of intensity where you pour everything into the fire before it goes cold again.
If you’ve been following along, thank you. Seriously. You’re catching this at a rare time — while it’s still messy, still forming, still alive. Not polished. Not packaged. Just real.
So stick around while it lasts. I don’t know how long this flood will keep coming, but while it does… I’ll keep giving you everything I’ve got.
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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