Looking for an artist/illustrator for next book cover

The second book of my Secret Doorway Tales series is out and out of my hair. It's always so much work when you are ready to publish a book and then the days afterwards spent marketing the book are always interesting, if a bit stressful.

So now that I'm finished with that I'm looking forward to writing the next book and I already have an outline finished and a tentative publication date: some time in December! What I need to do now is look for an artist because I've been wanting illustrations for the book covers on my the next four books. That is going to cost a pretty penny and then tracking an artists down and getting them to contact you is another issue. Creative people can be flaky (and I'm not pointing fingers here because I have that problem myself and it was especially true when I was young, lol). I think I should begin the search process right now.

Then there's the issue of whether they even want to do work for you. We self published authors have a stigma attached to our work and we have to jump through a lot of hoops just to get people to take our work seriously and even then, we don't get much respect. Some artists will only do work for best selling authors and I can understand that but it makes my job a little harder when trying to find an artist I like who might be interested in doing some work for me.

I've been looking at art on DeviantArt.com and all I can say is Wow! There's so much beautiful work there. Just beautiful. Well, I guess I better get back to work!