Looking to Next Year

Publishing is a business that can be defined as "hurry up and wait!" We always seem to be working on stuff so far ahead of it's release, and then racing to catchup when we fall behind. You race to get stuff to the printer, then wait for it to come back. You get excited about contracting a book, and then wait a year or two until it's ready to go. That's publishing. And redoing, fixing, tweaking. We do that a lot too. Here's a perfect example.

Coming up next year, first book out should be "Dark Moon Seasons" by Valerie Griswold-Ford. The middle book, following "Not Your Father's Horseman", to be followed by "Last Rites". A while back Val and I got chatting a bit about covers. I've never been a fan of the original cover and figured that trying to get two more to match it would send me running screaming in the opposite direction. So I snagged a few ideas on the two future volumes from Val and set to looking for the right images. Because of the gritty realism of the books, I was really hoping to go photorealistic. And then I found this image that Val and I both fell for. And with that for the basis of the second book, that was it! Had to find images to make it work for the other two books.

I think we've done that. Together I think all three volumes work. They've got a great color palette (wish I could take credit, but really I didn't do much) which I snagged off Kuler (an adobe product... a benefit of working in CS3 I guess). The only real work I did was in replacing the horse's eye. I don't have the best photoshop skills, and I kept thinking, there MUST be a faster way to do this... but I got it replaced, and voila! (this wasn't the first one I did, at first it was a girl's face, but I just wasn't happy with it). The best news was... Val liked them! So we are a go :) And now that they are ready... it's time to wait. (ooh, well, seeing them side-by-side, I see where the tweaks are needed! And really, you should see them with the back images, but the text isn't quite ready - the back really makes the cover package!) Ah well, it will give you something to look forward too!