Doing the 'Happy Dance'!

I woke up the other morning to find an email in my in-box from my UK editor. (Since I'm in Australia, he's awake when I'm asleep).

The covers for my trilogy have arrived. I'm blown away. Clint Langley has outdone himself with these covers. They are all great, but my favourite is the middle one.

Writing is like the iceberg, so much goes on even before the book gets sent to the publisher. What you finally see in the bookstore is the product of years of research, writing and rewriting. Much time is spent in the intangible world of the mind, so the days when something physical appears are red letter days.

Seeing these covers was a red letter day for me. All the writing, rewriting, researching and waiting have finally paid off.

Meanwhile, I am in neck deep in another new writing project and feeling deprived when life gets in the way. Family obligations and work conspire to eat up all my time as well as the mental space in my head where I have to go to create a new world. It all seems so intangible and ephemeral, but then I look at how the Chronicles of King Rolen's Kin is coming together and I know it is achieveable.

So this is a 'hang in there' post. It is all worth it.

How do you keep the flame of your passion for writing alive?

New Cover!

Here it is, the cover for Book One of King Rolen's Kin. (No text yet).

The artwork is by Clint Langley, a UK based artist who has worked on comics like Judge Dredd, Dark Blade and Sinister Dexter. He's also worked in the gaming world for Games Workshop, White Wolf, Hidden City Games and others. Plus he's done covers for Black Library, Warhammer and Battletech amongst others. We were lucky he had time to work on King Rolen's Kin.

I love the cover. It's moody and says fantasy in a modern way. SOLARIS is pleased with it.

Covers are so important and writers rarely get a chance to give much input. I was lucky, in that SOLARIS asked me for suggestions, so I researched current covers, found some I liked and prepared a Resonance Folder for the artist with the look of the world and the people, as well as descriptions etc.

Not every author is consulted when publishers prepare covers. Here Jane Lindskold does a post 'Look what what they've wrapped around my baby!

And here Peter Terzian does an interesting post about cover designs in 'Kill your Darlings'. He says:-

'We asked eight designers to show us their favorite runners-up, and to explain how and why these covers were nixed. In most cases, the designers were surprisingly sanguine. “It’s actually a good exercise to have to redesign something,”says free¬lance designer Gabriele Wilson. “Quite often, the designs end up being stronger than when they started.”'

I used to work as an illustrator, so I found this article really interesting.

I'm hoping, looking at the illustration above, readers would tempted to pick up a copy of my new book. It is a new series by an author they've never heard of.

I bought Brent Weeks trilogy based solely on the covers. The books are sitting on my 'to be read' pile. Have you come across some cover art recently that made you pick up a book by someone you didn't know?

Writing back cover Blurbs. Oh my!

My new editor at Solaris, asked me to write a 100 -150 word blurb for each book of the King Rolen's Kin (KRK) trilogy. Since these books are 120K, 130K and 150K, reducing them to bite sized blurbs seemed insurmountable.

Let's see, I had to retain enough of the feel of the story to get that across. I had to encapsulate the important conflicts of the plot, without revealing too much. And I had to do all this while making it sound interesting and enticing. Easy ... sure.

In the past, I've found it easier to write a blurb for a book I haven't written, than for one already completed, when I'm familiar with all the subtle twists and turns. Rather than tear my hair out, I went back to my KRK file and pulled out my Chapter Outlines which contain scene breakdowns.

When I'm writing an intricate plot that stretches over 1,500 pages and three kingdoms with parallel time lines, I keep notes for myself on what happens in each scene. I've learnt from experience there are times when I wake in the middle of the night thinking, 'Oh no, I forgot to mention that X was wearing his lion tooth trophy necklace early in book two.' Then I have to go back and find the right scene and the right place to mention this in passing. If I haven't done a scene breakdown I spend ages looking for the right spot. So I have this handy tool that reduces each book to the important events in each scene. But these documents are up to 10 pages long. At least I was one step closer to writing a 100 word blurb.

Still not there though. So I resorted to the old faithful:-

Who is the story about?
What do they want?
Why can't the achieve this?
How do they overcome it?

Only I avoided the last line because these were blurbs to tease the readers. After three days of intensive writing, editing, putting aside for a couple of hours, going back to it. I had the blurbs written. Under 400 words in 3 days -- Wow!

After all that I had to wonder, do the reading public pay much attention to blurbs? Do you buy a book on the strength of the back cover blurb?