The past is a foreign country...

January 2024

​Before we know it, 2024 is in full swing and the first month is done! I hope you had a break over the Christmas/New Year period, or at least an opportunity to refresh. For me, January has been a month of cover design and republication.
 
I’ve just published a new edition – the 30th anniversary edition – of the original Andrakis trilogy on Amazon, replete with the original titles – Guardians, Kingmaker, Dragonlords – and a unified series of covers! Thirty years ago – actually more, because the new edition was a little late - Guardians and Kingmaker hit the shelves in 1992 and Dragonlords in 1993, and I am always indebted to the Pan Macmillan Australia team for the chance to become a published writer.
 
The creation of this new edition is the last time I will revisit the Andrakis series. A cover design debacle with the original Dragonlords meant that, while Guardians and Kingmaker sold well, Dragonlords sales lagged, and for many years I had letters and, later, emails from readers asking me when I was releasing the third book or telling me that they could not get hold of book three. It was a very important lesson in publishing – that covers of series need to be identifiably linked.
 
Robert Stephenson at Altair did a reprint edition of the series in 2006 with the books renamed under their original draft titles – The Waking Dragon, Maker of Kings, Dragonlord War – and this series was replicated on Amazon in 2015 with cover art provided from Kirsi Salonen designed to unify the series more effectively. That sorta worked – but there were a range of issues with that set of publications, too.
 
So, this 30th anniversary edition finally has, I believe, a unified set of covers to identify the books as a single series. It’s been a strange, at times frustrating, journey.
 
I enjoy learning how to do cover designs. My early attempts were embarrassing, clumsy, and unprofessional. My latest efforts are improving (I think). The Andrakis trilogy covers represent a compromise and a conglomeration. I wanted to pay homage to the original Guardians cover art by Mike Worral that I’ve always loved for its blend of dragon fire and lightning, and so I created a stormy lightning background using Gencraft AI and this is designed to unify the book covers. I then encapsulated Kirsi’s original art in common border frames on the front covers to draw the originals into the Altair versions. The titles and author text were the most difficult, mainly because I did not want the art obscured by the lettering. I could have (maybe should have) made the titles much more prominent, but in the end I chose the smaller text to give the art the respect it deserves.
 
And so, into February. My focus this month is on editing and preparing two scifi novels for marketing. I’m chasing agents because I would like my new work to go through conventional publishing, so if you know someone who would be keen to take on my work definitely let me know. I am settling into this new life of full time writing and enjoying the freedom to be creative.