I'm really excited that my latest book Lies of the Dead is just about there and thrilled to unveil the cover created by the talented Andrew Brown of Design for Writers.
Unlike Driftwood and Lives Interrupted I had absolutely no ideas for the cover of Lies of the Dead, but working with Andrew makes the process incredibly easy. He asks a lot of questions about the plot and characters, important (poster) scenes, my own likes and dislikes, and then he goes away and works his magic.
Lies of the Dead is set predominantly in Cornwall which is an area I love. Writing those scenes has allowed me to wander through villages, along beautiful cliff walks and feel the sand under my feet on the glorious beaches. The setting of Poldrayth is fictitious but it is based on a real Cornish village to allow me to play around with the geography a little.
What would you risk to find the truth?
How well do we know those
closest to us? When Liam kills himself, his older brother Tom needs to
know why suicide was the only answer.
Tom's search leads him, and
his sister Andi, to a criminal world where their ideas of right and
wrong don’t exist, and where people aren’t who they claim to be.
Liam’s
legacy of deceit is dangerous and when Tom and Andi and her twin daughters
are threatened, Tom realises that truth may have too high a price.
Thanks a million Andrew for a wonderful cover - drumroll
Salvador Dali said, ‘Have no fear of perfection, you’ll
never reach it.’ I can certainly relate to that.
Samuel Johnson’s quote is a little kinder. ‘It is reasonable
to have perfection in our eye that we may advance toward it, though we know it
can never be reached.’
Back in 2006 I started writing a novel. I’d been honing my
craft and writing skills on short stories for some time, and decided it was
time to start work on the characters and story that became Driftwood.
In 2010 I entered Driftwood into a competition for unpublished romance
novels, and to my surprise I won, and Driftwood was published. As I read it I found there were parts I enjoyed and felt proud of, but also parts I wanted to change. I have a huge streak of perfectionism when it comes to my writing, so strong it is often difficult to know when it's time to let go.
I kept the electronic rights for Driftwood, and decided as a goal for this year to read it and make some changes. It's been a good experience working on something I originally started six years ago, and I've tried to keep to Elmore Leonard's advice of leaving out the parts that people skip.
It has also been great fun working with Andrew of Design for Writers on the new cover for Driftwood. He's created an amazing cover which I loved from the moment I opened the email with the proof. He commented about his design thoughts. 'It is hard to escape that central image of the driftwood, but I wanted something more than golden sands and blue sky. This image is darker and suspenseful, hinting at that darker side of the book. It is also wistful in some way, like a memory.' I totally agree, and the image sums up the tone of the book beautifully.
If you'd like to look at Driftwood, it is now available as a novella through Smashwords and Amazon.
Juliet, the protagonist, is a strong character. She is passionate
about building her business, but uses it as a shield from emotional
involvement. Her strength comes from her past, and has grown as a defence
mechanism. On a work trip to Christchurch, New Zealand, she bumps into Luke.
She thought she had managed to forget him, but from the moment they meet again, her life is not the same.
Luke wants to renew their relationship, but Juliet has
strong reservations (to put it mildly), and tells Luke they can’t recapture the
past.
Within days of meeting Luke, events escalate and Juliet realises
someone is trying to harm her. She is relieved to leave Auckland for Sydney to
work with a new client, but trouble follows her, and then Luke appears. Can she
trust him, or are his secrets more deadly than the ones she is hiding?
I have also included the opening chapters of Lives Interrupted, and the first four chapters of my new novel, Lies of the Dead, which should be published in April this year.
I've had a great time working on Driftwood, and I'm now looking forward to final edits on Lies of the Dead, with the help of good feedback and comments from my beta readers.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to share my experiences in writing and publishing.
After having a novel published, I decided to publish Lives Interrupted myself using KDP and Smashwords for the electronic version, and CreateSpace for a print version. I documented the steps I took and what worked best, and earlier this year decided to pull those posts together in an electronic book Smart Formatting.
About a month ago some of the requirements for cover images changed and I've updated the dimensions and information in Smart Formatting.
Below is the new information.
In mid 2012 Smashwords changed the minimum image pixel dimensions, as Apple required higher pixel counts. They require all ebook cover images to be at least 1,400 pixels wide. If you are looking for a good height to width ratio, say 1:5, you could go for an image of 1,600 wide by 2,400 tall.
KDP has a minimum of 1,000 pixels for the height and state an ideal ratio of 1:6. They recommend that images be 2,500 pixels high. For this ratio you could create an image of 1,600 wide and 2,560 high. The image must be in RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colour mode. I uploaded my image as a .jpg file although KDP say they will also accept .tif files.
Normal service will be resumed in the next post, and I'll continue with positive and negative character traits.
One of the pleasures of book browsing is looking at the covers. A good cover can give you a hint of the genre or style from the images, colours and font type used. This is an excellent, and very amusing, TED talk by Chip Kidd on book cover design.
Seeing the proofs of my novel was thrilling for about 5 minutes, then came a dawning realisation I had work to do.
Receiving the mockup of the front and back cover was exciting with the added bonus of no work to do.
I've always loved words and the meanings they can convey, and am fascinated that in communication with others we can still end up thinking different things though we agreed on everything.
I exchanged some emails with the publishers regarding the cover, and fortunately they had much the same idea as I did. However, I had a specific beach in mind when writing several of the scenes in Driftwood and so the reality of the cover was never going to be the same as the images in my mind, but they did a great job and I'm glad we weren't too far apart in our ideas.
It's getting closer and the release date is just a few weeks away.
