For years there was a fashion for every SF book cover to be black. It had to be deep space with some spaceship ploughing between the endless stars. Which is fine for space opera, but not for all books.
My own books, Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : Death Song, and the one I'm writing now, Panthera : Death Plain, are future crime involving the exploitation of wildlife and the natural world. I wanted my books to reflect some of the beauty of the natural world, and in the first chapter of Death Plain I have my character Ren going out into the golden light of a savannah dawn. In Death Song most of the action takes place in the rainforest wildlife reserves of Domovo. That colour palette was very different: overwhelmingly green with the forest floor getting little light. Sparkling dawns here can usually only be seen from clearings, the edge of the forest, or high up in its canopy.
Death Plain moves back to the great savannah wildlife reserves of what is by then New Africa. Ren has been a major player in ensuring that the savannah still exists. This time she's investigating the death of goldcats, the descendants of lions.
My favourite times of day are sunrise and sunset, especially on those clear days when the sky is full of colours. And I want my universe to be full of colour too. Goth blackness is not for me, I want the light and vibrancy of the natural world around me.
So let's start a campaign to get SF publishers to produce covers in a colour other than black. And you never know, producing more colourful books might tempt more women to give the genre a try.
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