Month: October 2016

Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New!

/ unspywriter / Leave a comment

Wait, we’ve got a few months to the new year, don’t we?

Of course we do. I’m announcing a new cover for an old book. Well, it’s not that old. It came out in 2012.

I’m working on a little project to update the covers of my short story collections to make them stand out more. It’s been fun and has stretched my PhotoShop skills, but I like the results.

So, have a look.

Fences and Other Stories

This was a collection of some literary and fantasy stories, ones I’ve always been fond of. Here’s the cover I selected from CreateSpace when I published the collection in 2012.

fences-new-cover

2012 Cover

Not bad, but I could do better–or so several people told me. Four years later, I know about a great site called Pixabay, which is a large repository of public-domain photographs. You can use the photos commercially and without attribution–though I’ve at least given Pixabay an attribution. Pixabay’s selection is extensive, though the more obscure or detailed you get in your search, the fewer returns you get.

The title story for this collection (“Fences”) involves a white, picket fence, which this cover doesn’t evoke at all.

A search on Pixabay, and I got more than enough to choose from.

I selected this one, imported it into PhotoShop, added the title, subtitle, and byline (of

fences-new-cover-front

2016 Cover

course), and this result, I think, is more true to the title story.

This is one of the advantages of indie publishing: If you want to refresh a cover or even the interior (I, uh, may have found a few typos.), it’s relatively easy to do. Your book isn’t available for sale for a couple of days until the databases communicate, but for me, it was worth it for a better-looking cover.

What say you?

 

Blood Vengeance

blood-vengeance-cs

2012 Cover

I used to be into minimalist covers. I wanted people to be attracted to the story inside, not pretty cover art. Yes, I was naive. When Blood Vengeance, my first collection of espionage stories came out in 2012, I thought this cover, again from CreateSpace, was eye-catching. I liked the cover color and the stark font for the title.

It resonated with me, and with some readers, because when I sold it side-by-side with another book, which had art on the cover, the minimalist Blood Vengeance cover out-sold the other.

After a few years of reflection, and learning about the importance of a good cover for an indie-published book, I came to realize the cover was dull as rust.

Another excellent resource for indie authors is SelfPubBookCovers. For relatively low prices (most well under $100), you can purchase a professionally designed cover, which you can customize yourself, either on the site or in PhotoShop, which is what I did. (It can also be imported into other graphics programs and sites, e.g., Canva.) For the price, you get a 300 dpi jpeg suitable for a print cover and a 72 dpi jpeg for a Kindle or ebook cover. All you have to do is give an attribution to the cover’s artist, which SelfPubBookCovers provides.

You can also pay extra for more customization, including a back cover and a spine, and for additional covers for a related series of books. I purchased a cover from SelfPubBookCovers for my 2015 novella, The Yellow Scarf, and I was wowed by the result.

bv-new-front-cover

2016 Cover

Here’s the new cover for Blood Vengeance. Again, I feel as though this cover, even in its simplicity, is more eye-catching and relates better to the title story (“Blood Vengeance”).

The other thing you may have noticed is a slight change in the byline. The espionage genre is mostly a man’s game. That’s changing. I’m certainly not hiding the fact I’m a woman who writes about spies, but bearing in mind the person who picks up a book on the basis of its cover, why not give myself a little extra step on that break-in ladder? Again, I don’t hide my gender–you’ll find it on the “About the Author” page in the book.

What’s Next?

Expect new covers for 2012’s Spy Flash and 2015’s The Better Spy, as well as a new cover for the other 2015 novella, My Noble Enemy.

And before the year is out–[insert drum roll here]–cover reveals for Spy Flash II and my first novel, A War of Deception.

Yes, you read it here first. In 2017 my very first, standalone novel will come out.

Are you as excited as I am?

P.S., I doubt it. 😉

 

Why Do I Write?

/ unspywriter / Leave a comment
Possibly the second most-asked question for writers, after “Where do you get your ideas?”, is “Why do you write?”
 
I’ve reposted the meme about (paraphrased) “writing is like breathing; if I don’t do it I die” several times. A bit dramatic, of course, but I’ve spent so much of my life writing, I can’t imagine doing anything else. When I got a job as a reporter on an aviation magazine, it was a died-and-gone-to-heaven moment: They paid me to write about what I loved, airplanes.
 
I write because it’s how I communicate best. Often, the spoken word fails me, but the written word never has.
 
I write because I feel deeply about the world around me. When I saw genocide in the Balkans, I had to write about it. When I saw a disproportionate number of black men killed by police, I had to write about it. When I see injustice, racism, sexism, etc., I have to write about it.
Writing for me is catharsis. I’ve exorcised the demons of my father’s suicide and my mother’s alcoholism by writing them into my fiction. As I said, when the spoken word fails me…
 

How I Got Started

I started writing stories in elementary school with my weekly list of spelling words. You remember–the exercise where you had to use each correctly in a sentence. My sentences comprised a story, usually about horses.
 
One year for Christmas, I got an alphabet, rubber-stamp set, and I set about printing a newspaper for my neighborhood–based on what I heard my mother and her friends talking about at the kitchen table. I hand-printed, letter-by-letter, a half dozen copies and left them on doorsteps. Needless to say that didn’t go over well with my mother because I’d essentially repeated her gossip. The rubber stamp set mysteriously disappeared.
In high school, my English teacher caught me writing fan fiction in her class. She confiscated my notebook but gave it back to me the next day. “Keep writing,” she said, “just not in my class unless it’s an assignment.” My very first spy story she accepted as an assignment for class. My first book of short stories, Rarely Well-Behaved, I dedicated to her.
In college, I was the first non-English major to be published in the literary magazine–my first published sci-fi story. (It sucked, as I discovered when I found it thirty-plus years later.)
I had a break in writing after college when I taught school for a few years. I got a job as an editorial assistant for an aviation insurance consortium, and that led to my dream job writing about airplanes and aviation for the FAA. While I wrote articles and briefing papers and white papers and studies and regulations and manuals and congressional Q&A, I still wrote fiction at home.
But it was a long, long drought of having my fiction published–more than thirty years. So, I decided it was time to retire and write for myself.

The Big Mo Builds

That first year after retirement, nothing got published. I remembered how much I disliked those rejection notifications, but I kept at it. First came a story in a start-up lit mag; then, another. Publication in an anthology. Placing well in a contest. Another anthology. More lit mags. Another contest.

In between were agent rejections, self-publishing some short story collections, small publisher rejections, and a few more agent rejections.

Still, all this has made me feel I’m on the edge of something I’ve wanted my whole life, something that’s about to happen. I’ve always said if I could simply get my stories in people’s hands they would find something to like about them, that they would want more.

In the midst of all this, I stopped being the writer others said I should be and became the writer I’m supposed to be.

Why do I Write?

Because it lets me be vulnerable and forces me to be authentic.

What more can you ask of life?