April 28, 2020

Squirrels

This has been a squirrel week - so many distractions and challenges and opportunities! Work and family aside, even the writing has squirrels bounding in disparate directions, demanding attention.

So I thought I'd focus on fixing the Amazon edition covers on the Andrakis series. Andrakis hasn't had much luck when it comes to covers. The original series from Pan Macmillan started with different artists unable to capture the first cover until the final design emerged with Andra on the final battlefield facing dragons emerging out of roiling clouds. I totally loved that first cover visual because of its energy and dark threat. The lettering for the title - meh - but the cover was great. And then it was all downhill. The cover for Kingmaker always felt half-finished, leaning towards cartoonish; Andra standing in a stream of dragonfire on Cennednyss bridge. And then came the disastrous cover for book three. Conceptually, Dragonlords with Andra confronting A Ahmud Ki beneath the twisted trees had merit, but the cover design was nothing like the first two books and readers looking for book three didn't recognise the link. By the time most did, Dragonlords was off the book shelves and it still remains the most difficult book to track down. I maintain that the sales drop from book two to three was entirely due to the odd marketing decision to make book three look nothing like books one and two. that experience made me overly cautious thereafter. The original series covers are posted with this entry.

Jump ahead ten years and the Andrakis books were out of print so Rob Stephenson kindly had them redesigned and marketed through Altair as POD (Print on Demand) for readers still interested in reading the series. It was a low budget, quiet reprint, but Kirsi Salonen created new art work for the covers and the series finally looked like it was a series.

Jump forward ten more years and I decided to rekindle (pun deliberately intended) availability of the Andrakis series via Amazon. Well, what a learning journey that has become so far as cover production is concerned. Initially I created three very amateurish covers on white backgrounds just to see how the whole CreateSpace/Kindle space worked. Then I thought maybe I should make the covers a little more professional, so I played with Kirsi's original artwork, made several mistakes and finally ended up with a finished product last week. What did I learn?

Okay, I learned I'm no artist - or designer actually. But I have learned a little more about design and Photoshop.

I learned self-publishing is a little bit of fun and a lot of craftsmanship and that precision is essential. Someone In Amazon would be sick of sending me emails saying there was still an error in the print or on the cover. Jan Balo popped into conversations and offered sound advice to help me avoid some design errors. However, I made the corrections and learned more from the mistakes. Text shape and size can significantly change the 'professional' appearance of a cover. Layers can be manipulated to add depth. Colour matching and linking adds continuity, and so on. I've included the final covers as evidence of the progress. I would post the alternative cover designs I tried while I was learning but they are seriously embarrassing (and no doubt still visible somewhere on the web).

So the cover squirrels kept me chasing in circles the past week, but I've enjoyed the chase.

Writing squirrels also had me running in circles - and jumping between projects, including writing the first chapter of the sequel to The Last Wizard (yes, I know, 25 years later!). I've mapped out a story/plot for the second book. When I finish it, and begin the third in the series, the titles will emerge as Tamesan's Song: The Last Wizard Book One (the original), Chasse's Song: The Last Wizard Book Two and Jaysin's Song: The Last Wizard Book Three. I originally wrote The Last Wizard to be a stand-alone novel, but even as I reached the end the next two books announced themselves. I wrote notes etc, but my life tilted sharply in a different direction in the late 1990s and the project never took flight - but now it has.

So, yes, I'm working on three writing projects concurrently again. Squirrels. Everywhere.

And then theres' COVID 19 and school and IT and...