Megan O’Keefe is well-known in fandom circles for her involvement in Drinks with Authors at WorldCon, but come next year, she’s going to have to make a spot for herself at the table: Angry Robot is publishing her debut novel, Steal the Sky, in January 2016. A story of conmen, flying boats, and political intrigue, it’s the first volume of The Scorched Continent trilogy, which the publisher likens to “The Lies of Locke Lamora on giant sand dunes with exploding airships.” Sign us up!

Angry Robot HQ has given us a chance to show off artist Kim Sokol’s cover for Steal the Sky, and tell you a little bit about how it came together. Keep scrolling past the back cover blurb for the full story, featuring commentary from the author and artist.

Detan Honding, a wanted conman of noble birth and ignoble tongue, has found himself in the oasis city of Aransa. He and his trusted companion Tibs may have pulled off one too many cons against the city’s elite and need to make a quick escape. They set their sights on their biggest heist yet – the gorgeous airship of the exiled commodore Thratia. But in the middle of his scheme, a face changer known as a doppel starts murdering key members of Aransa’s government. The sudden paranoia makes Detan’s plans of stealing Thratia’s ship that much harder. And with this sudden power vacuum, Thratia can solidify her power and wreak havoc against the Empire. But the doppel isn’t working for Thratia and has her own intentions. Did Detan accidentally walk into a revolution and a crusade? He has to be careful – there’s a reason most people think he’s dead. And if his dangerous secret gets revealed, he has a lot more to worry about than a stolen airship.

Pretty cool, eh? Gotta love the detail on that airship. The cover was initially conceived by Mike Underwood, Angry Robot’s sales and marketing manager. Here’s Megan with her thoughts:

“When Mike Underwood first drew me a quick sketch of his idea for the cover (a sketch which he made me promise never to speak of, oops), I knew it was going to rock. The essential concept was to show the protagonists walking through the streets of the oasis city of Aransa like they owned them, with the airship they planned to steal high above—both a prize and a shadow. [Artist] Kim Sokol took that concept and really brought it to life. I love so many things about this image. From the color palette to the angled perspective, it really nails the mood of the book. It’s full of energy, and also a little bit gritty, just like the characters it’s depicting. And that airship is so lovely I could lick it. I won’t… but I could.”

We’ll let Mike take over from here:

“When Marc Gascoigne (our Publisher) asked me to take point on the cover design, I started working up a landscape-oriented piece that would foreground the city, with one of the leads included to personalize it. But Marc, being the expert art director he is, challenged me to dig deeper, to give myself an alternative so we could pick between the two. My next idea was a Badass Walk, ala the shot from a TV credits scene where the heroes walk toward the camera, looking cool, as the guitar wails in the theme song. That’s what the book was to me—character-centric, sneaky but full of bravado. This is a book about thieves, after all. I drew a truly abysmal thumbnail sketch as a starting point, then consulted with Megan to flesh out the idea.

I found Kim Sokol in one of my many hours scouring the internet for artistic talent, and I loved her use of light as well as her detailed figure-work with strong visual characterization. Kim presented two rough takes of the brief, which I present here:

“We all loved the angled approach, so Kim presented an initial line art piece:

“After refining design takes for the heroes outfits, we had it locked. Kim was amazingly responsive, and pulled out a great tweak with lighting to make sure we could see our heroes’ faces and connect with them. Marc brought it all home with the cover design, and here we are.”

Kim Sokol sounds like she’s very pleased with the results. “This cover was a wonderful challenge to paint; the scene was laid out pretty clearly in the brief, but it was my job to do justice to the scale of the setting and the intrigue of the characters,” she said. “Nailing the composition, perspective, and lighting was more than half the battle, in this case, since the goal was a city that felt lively without an image that felt too busy or unfocused.”

We’ll say one thing: the cover does the job—we can’t wait to read this one.

Megan E. O’Keefe lives in the Bay Area of California and makes soap for a living. She has worked in arts management and graphic design, and spends her free time tinkering with anything she can get her hands on. She is a first place winner in the Writers of the Future competition, vol. 30. You can find her online at meganokeefe.com and @MeganofBlushie on Twitter.

Steal the Sky is available January 6, 2016.