Yesterday I signed up for a Kindle Direct Publishing account at Amazon; when the book goes live it’ll be at Amazon first and then I’ll try and get it up at B&N and iBooks and everywhere else.  Before I do that, though, I need to make a couple of decisions: one relatively inconsequential, and one a pretty big deal.

Inconsequential:  The collection itself is going to be called The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1.  It’s the stories inside that I’m wondering about.  As it stands now, they’re named numerically, and numerically they’re out of chronological order– they’re just numbered in the order I’ve written them.  Two, notably, isn’t finished, and two has the potential to be much longer than the others– it may, in fact, be a novel.  I’m currently thinking that the first volume will contain at least four stories:  BA 1, 3, 4, and 5, possibly also 6 if I’m able to get it written in the next week or two.  1, 3, and 4 together are about the length of 5, so toss in a brief foreword and we’re looking at around 30K words for the entire collection, for, I think, $1.99.

At any rate, I like the numbering scheme for the stories, but it may prove confusing, especially if I envision a world where I continue to write these things, and BA 2 ends up being in volume 4 along with stories 6, 8, and 12, only none of them are in chronological order.  Seems potentially troublesome.  So I need to come up with names for these things.  This isn’t really a problem, I just suck at names.  But it’s fixable.

A bigger problem is the cover.  The cover, for obvious reasons, is huge for casual sales.  I can handle the basic typography bit myself and between me and my former newspaper editor wife I think I can manage to avoid any major rookie mistakes like putting the title of my book in Comic Sans or Papyrus or something like that.

No, the real trouble is the image.  It’s a sci-fi book, so finding something I can just take a picture of is effectively impossible even if I were a talented photographer, which I’m not.  I considered using some sort of public domain nebula picture from NASA or something, but the problem is that while a star field would communicate the idea “science fiction” fairly effectively it’s not going to be an especially striking image, especially when boiled down to a small Amazon thumbnail, and it would be pretty generic, too.

Then I thought about something like this.  Recognize these?

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but they’re the symbols for the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, respectively, from Star Wars.  The Benevolence Archives are heavily influenced, by design, by Star Wars; I just hope I’ve differentiated myself enough that we’re clearly in “homage” territory and not “ripoff.”

But I’m thinking if I can come up with a stark-looking, black-and-white symbol for the Benevolence, and put that image on a textured background along with my title and author information… that just might work.  Something simple and instantly memorable, and hopefully not outside my meager skills as an artist.

I just need to, uh, come up with something.  I have an idea in mind but I haven’t tried to actually put it together either on paper or in a graphics program yet.  We’ll see how it goes.

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Quick Jihad note:  I’ll dig up the link later, but you might remember that he came back from his expulsion and promptly got suspended for three days after lunch, not even making it half a day.  He returned on Friday of last week, made it through the entire day, then didn’t even make it to first period on Monday (yesterday) before getting suspended again.  At this point Mom is being strongly encouraged to withdraw him before we expel him again, which will be happening the next time we see him in the office for any reason.  I’d give him one more day, the way things have been going.