Tag: cover design

In which I have an illness

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Careful readers will notice that for some reason there are two copies of Disquiet Gods, Book Six of the Sun Eater series, on that shelf. Exceptionally detail-oriented humans might further notice that they are not exactly the same! The title is a different color, as is the author’s name, the character image is different, and so is the publisher. Further, one title is matte in finish and matches the other books precisely, and the top book appears to be glossy.

You might, just maybe, also notice that the top book is roughly a quarter inch taller than the books below it, but if you don’t, don’t worry; it just means that you’re neurotypical.

Shall I explain? Let me explain. Author and apparent personal nemesis Christopher Ruocchio originally had a five-book contract with DAW for the Sun Eater series. Upon writing five books and not completing the series, he asked for a two-book extension to the contract. DAW offered a single book. And Ruocchio said “bet” and bounced, taking the last two books of the series to Baen, where he used to work as an editor.

Oh, don’t worry, said Baen, we’ll make sure the new books match the old ones! Promise! We’ll use the same artist and everything! And, well, they did use the same artist, but they switched from the matte paper to the glossy paper and made the books ever-so-slightly taller, just different enough that I suspect no one noticed, me included, until the book was on the shelf with its series-mates.

And then a certain subset of humanity of which I am a member lost their minds, because why in the merry hell would you do your best to make sure that the books mostly match, except for those two kind of important details? You get no credit for that at all! None! We hate you!

(By “you,” I mean the publisher, a faceless corporate entity; I’m completely certain Ruocchio had nothing to do with this decision. The man is an author so I suspect he’s One of Us anyway.)

Here’s how they looked originally:

And, again, if that doesn’t bother you, it just means you’re normal. It’s okay to be normal. Also, the book isn’t deeper than the others, just … puffier? I don’t know why it looks so much further forward on the shelf than the books next to it.

Anyway, at some point DAW came to their senses? And apparently bought his contract with Baen out, and now they’re publishing the whole series again, including their version of the book that Baen originally published and the final book. I have to believe this cost them more money than just giving Ruocchio the two books he wanted at the beginning, but I have no idea. So the new DAW version of the book matches the rest precisely, as it should. I’m going to do another book cull over winter break, and the original version of the book will end up in the basement. I can imagine a universe where it’s worth slightly more than cover price in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

(For the record, I bought most of my Christmas presents with my Amazon card, which I get 5% back on. Not that paying for it would have stopped me, but I got the second copy of the book basically for free.)

This is, believe it or not, not the greatest spine-matching sin that has been perpetrated on my bookshelves. I bought an entire special edition of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series so that I didn’t have to look at this abomination any longer:

Again: why are they just sort of the same? Why change things, guaranteeing you’re going to enrage a certain portion of your readers, but just change them a little? If the shit’s not gonna match, just fuckin’ go nuts and completely redesign everything. This makes no Goddamn sense at all. I was already mad enough when Veiled Throne lost the gold and the embossed title, but I was willing to put up with it. The rest of those changes are just gratuitously evil.

I’m going to go take some sort of pill; I suspect I need one.

On the best possible use of my time

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, Writing1 Comment

The book doesn’t have a real title or a cover and only has like 1400 words right now but hell let’s spend an hour fiddling around with title logos just because. Why not, right?

Ebook panic of the day and some school notes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Writing2 Comments

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?

Unknown300px-Rebel_Alliance_logo.svg
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.

—————-

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.