A few weeks ago, we announced Fiction, a new way to tell stories on Medium. Since then, hundreds of you have been creating your own Fiction stories. And now it’s time to pick the cover of The New Fiction.

Our readers decide what story we feature on the cover each week, and this time that decision is in your hands. We’ve selected six finalists and given them each a different illustration treatment. Now it’s up to you to pick a winner that will be featured as the cover image for this week’s most popular story on Medium.

The six finalist designs and the stories they represent are:

We are excited to announce that we are working on a new album with the band Fiction. This will be their first new album in 13 years. To celebrate, we want you, the fans, to pick the cover of their new album. We have created a place for you to upload your art and vote for your favorite piece of art from these submissions.

The winner will receive $500 and credit on the front and back of the album. If your piece is chosen as the cover, we will also pay for all your recording and touring expenses for one year. The voting will be open until midnight (EST) May 15.

Check out some samples of the artwork here: http://www.pickthecover.com/fiction

Click here to submit your own entry: http://www.pickthecover.com/

We are more than a little obsessed with the idea of being featured in Rolling Stone, and for good reason. If you want your band to be taken seriously, that’s the magazine to be featured in. The problem is, there are a lot of bands out there who want the same thing and are willing to do just about anything to make it happen.

So we figured that what they needed was an opportunity to show off their artistic skills by designing the cover of The New Fiction’s new album. It was a really simple contest — whoever made the best album art would win a cash prize and get the opportunity to have their artwork featured on our upcoming album. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

“In celebration of the release of The New Fiction’s new album, A Different Ship, we are offering you the chance to design the cover. Choose from a selection of photos provided by the band and create your own artwork for the new album. You can submit your work here before 11:59pm EST on August 29th and it will be considered for use on the limited edition CD release of the new album.”

‘A Different Ship,’ due out in September 2009, is The New Fiction’s first full-length record since ‘The Story’ in 2007. The title track from that album was featured in a commercial for Cadillac and played on MTV, ESPN and VH1. The song also made it onto both Billboard & Mediabase Alternative Charts as well as into regular rotation at Sirius/XM Radio.**

**Author: The New Fiction

For decades, Fiction have been one of the most underrated bands in pop music, and their new album The Glass Intact is one of the year’s best.

“The Glass Intact” will be released on September 3rd and to celebrate we want you to pick the cover art for the record. We’ve narrowed it down to our final three and now we’re asking you to vote on your favorite!

The winning cover will be used as both the CD cover and the LP sleeve. As an added bonus, the winner gets a free copy of the album when it comes out on vinyl and a digital download code for use after its release date.

That’s right, you could potentially get an advance copy of “The Glass Intact” just by voting for your favorite cover! Here are your options:

Option 1:

Option 2:

Option 3:

You can cast your vote here . The poll will close at 11PM EST this Friday, August 3rd. Be sure to tell all your friends, family members, co-workers, acquaintances, etc (basically anyone who might listen to music) about this page so they can vote as well! We’ll announce a winner/cover next week. Thanks everyone!

The Fiction is currently recording their debut full-length, which will be released independently this summer. To help them choose the album art, they’ve commissioned local artist Eric Holland to create six pieces of work that may end up as the album art.

In order to pick the cover, The Fiction wants to open it up to you guys. They’ll post all six pieces on Facebook for fans to vote on where the cover should be placed in order from 1-6 (1 being the most preferred). So if you’re interested in seeing your favorite piece of art grace the cover of The Fiction’s debut CD, be sure to like their page!

So you’ve written a novel. And you think it’s pretty good. You’d like to put it on the market and see how it does. But here’s the problem: when you look at your cover art, you discover that it’s really bad. There are graphic design awards, but not for bad cover art.

You could try to get someone else to do a new cover for you. But…you know, probably no one is going to be much better than that original cover artist, whoever he or she was. Or you could make the cover yourself, but…you’re busy writing novels — why bother learning how to do covers?

So what should you do?

The answer is simple: make your own album art.

What? Make my own album art? Isn’t that kind of like learning how to play my own instruments? Yes it is, sort of. Or…sort of like taking some time off from writing novels to learn how to make movies or video games or something else that people might enjoy more than your novels.

And the good news is…it won’t cost you much time at all! You can just take some of the time you were going to spend learning Photoshop or GIMP or whatever program will let you make