April 19, 2020

Back we go..

Tomorrow is back to work after four days and two weekends away from the chaos. In fairness to Meg, I did spend three days working on school web sites for teachers, parents and students during the so-called break, but the last four days I devoted to being a writer.

After a wee bit of excitement back in 2015 when I tried to kick start a flagging writing business, I neglected much of what needs to be fostered. As my previous blogs detail, I have returned to writing in earnest and the momentum is good. What I neglect is everything AFTER a book is written, and that I must change.

This week I revamped my tired old writing website at www.tonyshillitoe.com.au Drop by for an updated view - still a page to fix around how and where to buy my books, but essentially it's almost done. From now on I will also store these blogs on that site.

I also spent time this week revamping the Amazon covers for the Ashuak and Andrakis series, learning new techniques and applying them to the covers to make them less amateurish. This led to updating the interior content as well, again to improve the appearance. It takes a full day to design a cover, and another whole day to check the layout of the content, and that's the tip of the iceberg. Examples of the updated covers, one from each series, are included below (drafts - finals are too large a file for here).

Moving forward, I am about to embark on book two of the new fantasy series later this week and I'll add updates of that in the next entry. For the record, yesterday I was distracted for three hours and wrote an intro to yet another new series. I need to focus!