Posts Tagged ‘Sinclair Series’

Progress Report, Covers, and Complaints

Friday, June 3rd, 2016

Progress Report!

I’m doing a paper read-through of Surrender to Ruin, which is going about as expected. It’s a little unusual that I’m at 82K words without a final chapter and with all but chapter 1 to read and revise. That’s because, per usual, I have heavily revised chapter 1 three times and then got all the way to chapter three when I realized I needed a whole new chapter before the then current chapter 3, which I then wrote and then I started over and revised chapter 1 twice more and now I’m moving on to chapter 2… Which is more or less how it usually goes with the paper revisions.

At this rate, I’ll end up at well over 100K, but I expect to find chapters that require deletion. I’m almost ready to post a first chapter to read, so look for that!

For those who care, I am currently revising my paper version with a Kaweco Sport fine point fountain pen with “lilac summer” ink. It’s very pretty! The Kaweco Sport fountain pen is a great pen. I enjoy writing revising with it.

Covers

As my blog readers know, I have the final cover for Surrender to Ruin which I love love love. I asked my cover artist to match the look and feel of Lord Ruin, which is why I went with a custom shoot for the image. There was nothing out there that was perfect and I didn’t want to compromise. Then I realized that A Notorious Ruin, which is Book 2 in the series, was going to look very out of place. I didn’t even bother looking for stock images. If there was anything out there that would work, I’d have used it for Surrender to Ruin. And so….

I did A/B testing for the  cover. In the first round, my preferred image (Looking Straight Ahead pose) lost by a statistically significant amount — though not overwhelmingly. So then I A/B tested Sideways Pose with the green background and the purple background, and that was more or less a tie. There was an insignificant edge for purple. On social media, the green vs. purple choice had a slight edge for green.

!

I SO SO appreciate everyone who weighed in. By the way, purple was my favorite. As was the Straight Ahead pose. But I could see why the sideways pose had the edge.

Now what!? Well, I put the three covers up in order across my 27″ monitor screen and swapped between purple and green for Book 2. I asked my sister to look. My preference was for the green, and so was hers and so … the green background it is. It goes better with Books 1 and 3. When it’s final, I’ll post all three so you can see for yourselves.

Complaint Department

Is anyone else having trouble finding books to read at Amazon? I used to be able to browse and find books and authors I wanted to read or try out. And now? It’s awful. Apparently, there are only 5 books they intend to show me, and if I don’t want any of those, too bad. The books they show me aren’t even remotely close to something I think I’d enjoy.

My last 10 book purchases were all at iBooks.

How about you?

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Which Cover Do you Prefer? Poll!

Thursday, June 2nd, 2016

I am redoing the cover for A Notorious Ruin because it needs to fit with the style of Book 1 (Lord Ruin) and Book 2 (Surrender to Ruin) and it currently does not. I would LOVE to know which you prefer.

Image quality is not final. Neither is background color.

Which Cover Pose do you Prefer?

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Regency man sitting on a chair a little sideways leaning slightly to one side, looking like he's thinking damn you're hot.

Sideways Pose

 

A Regency Man sitting on a chair looking straight forward like he's thinking you're not naked enough.

Straight on Pose

 

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My Demon Warlord – Status

Thursday, December 31st, 2015

I have a status! Something to tell you!  I just sent the MS for My Demon Warlord to the copy editor.

It turned out that I did not one but two significant rewrites even after my revisions were done. I wasn’t happy with certain parts of the story. My second paper read-through was a sea of pretty ink colors. Lets, see, I used sparkly green,  copper, sunrise orange, pink, purple, sparkly blue, and sparkly gray. I’d run one pen dry, and either swap out the cartridge immediately and keep going or switch pens until I ran that one dry….  Then I put in those edits and did a third paper read through and…. again massively revised (see list of ink colors above) and then I got in those edits and started reading again, and then I gave up on paper and went back to the digital version and things were finally holding together the way I wanted them to. And then I was mostly catching little stuff like typos and punctuation instead of completely rewriting and now it’s on it’s way to the copy-editor.

After that, it goes to proofreading, then to the formatter.

For everyone who’s been asking about Book 3 in the Sinclair Sister’s series (that would be Emily and Devon!) I can start the plotting/brainstorming pretty much now. I’ve already worked out the basic framework so I may start drafting sooner rather than later.

For everyone who’s been asking about stories in the “The King’s Dragon” world, I’ll be writing the first one after Emily and Devon. That’s a story idea I’ve jokingly called The Dark Elf Series. It’s got elves. It’s dark. There’s a short story set in that world over at Heroes and Heartbreakers. You can read the whole thing there for free. You have to register, but that’s free. MacMillan sells the story for $0.99 at most vendors. (The King’s Dragon, by Carolyn Jewel)

The off-site office makes a big difference in my ability to string together some hours without being interrupted.

 

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