Ebook cover for a business-themed novel

The Parable of Rust

Amos Williamson

Amos Williamson is the pseudonym of a financial professional (and therefore, no portrait). This is the first book by the author, so the author name doesn't (yet) have any brand value and should probably be de-emphasized.

The Parable of Rust tells the story of the boom, bust, and recovery of the fictitious factory town of Rust and three generations of the family which builds, owns, sells, and re-acquires the factory, or at least what remains of it after corporate raiders lay off half off the workforce and then flip it to a conglomerate which mismanages it into failure. The failure of the factory sets off cascading financial crisis, exacerbated by the greed, incompetence, and duplicity of its biggest bank. By historical quirk, Rust happens to be an independent state, a Liechtenstein on the Great Lakes, and therefore has at city-state scale a full suite of national institutions which prove incapable of containing the crisis. Rust is forced to swallow its pride and seek a bailout from Washington to stave off total collapse, but receives only subsistence-level support. With Rust completely knocked on its back, its mayor reaches out to the exiled scion of the factory family to return. He agrees, and must find a way to get Rust back on its feet.

The target audience is professionals interested in business and business-adjacent topics Age: adult and college-age Gender: for all, but I'd guess the readership will likely skew 75+% male

The primary theme of the story is of decay and fall (although leavened throughout with a lot of satire) and I would like the cover to suggest that. I'd like the general feel to be reserved, stately, somewhat formal (but not stuffy, ornate, or baroque). The story is centered on a factory through four "ages" of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron (a la Hesiod) spanning ~1970-2010, each of which gets sequentially worse / more degraded than the previous. One concept I had in mind (but am not insistent on) was an image of a factory which has a time-lapse feel to it: new and gleaming on the left edge, transitioning towards rusted out and decrepit on the right edge.

- no photo-realistic depictions of people (I'd prefer to avoid or minimize any depictions of human figures at all)

Every design category has flexible pricing for all budgets. Book cover starts at $299.