Covering Down
Sunday is my publishing work day. I think I mentioned that before, didn’t I? I got a lot of good stuff done over the last couple weeks, and I just thought I’d share.
Last week, I worked on getting my novelette, The Best And The God-Woman, ready to go. I wrote this one something like a year ago. Don’t recall exactly. I submitted it to Writers Of The Future, and it either got straight-up rejected or an Honorable Mention. I don’t recall, which is pretty bad. Anyway, after that I sent it around to the other venues that will accept submissions of its length (16,500 words) but had no joy. And then I just let it sit. I had other things in my crosshairs (Pericles and Out-Dweller primarily) so I didn’t do anything with it. Anyway, it’s the last of my completed works that’s not out there for the world to enjoy, so I decided to fix that. Here’s what’s in store:
The greatest terrors come from within.
Yili never questioned the Gods’ decrees, as handed down to the people from the elders. Do not tarry long on the beach, for there lurks the Beast. Do not venture beyond the breakers, for the sea holds nothing but death and man lives on the island alone. Until the day a strange object approached the island, borne by the wind and waves toward Yili’s home until it broke apart on the reef and deposited a woman and a man, who could only be Gods themselves, onto the beach.
The Beast wants to destroy them. The elders distrust them. And Yili finds himself helplessly drawn to the God-Woman, at the risk of all he knows and loves.
Stay tuned; The Beast And The God-Woman will be available by the end of the month.
But wait! There’s more!
Yesterday, the Admiral (my better half) ran the Hot Chocolate 15k in downtown San Diego. After cheering her on, I got to work again. First up – an audiobook cover.
Yes, I said audiobook. I decided to get rolling on that side of the business a couple weeks ago, prompted by ACX’s impending shift in royalty split. That change has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere so I don’t feel the need to opine here except to say I’m conflicted about it. On the one side, screw them. There are other distributors out there. On the other side, while several of those distributors offer a better split (I found one that does 80/20 to the writer), after audible takes its cut that split ends up being less than the new rates under ACX. So although the abrupt and unexplained change pissed me off, from a strictly monetary perspective it won’t pay to go elsewhere. It’s going to take some heavy thought to decide how to roll on this one.
Ah decisions, decisions…
Anyway, I put all of my short stories and my two collections up for audition with the hope of getting deals finalized before the deadline. Only my short stories because I want to pay for the production vice do royalty split and I don’t have the $ to do the novels. *shrug* Maybe I should have done the novels under royalty split, but I don’t like the notion of 7 years of royalty splits – that could get VERY expensive if the audiobook does well. As it is I’ll wait until the novels bring in enough $ to justify the outlay for the audiobooks myself. The short stories, though, are much less expensive, even the collections. So I’ve got 6 or 7 audiobook titles in production as we speak. I would have liked to get them all done – I told the guy who auditioned for the collections to audition for the individual shorts as well; since he would record the stories anyway it made sense to knock them all out. But he didn’t get auditions in for them all by the cutoff. *shrug* Oh well. Another guy auditioned for a couple of them, so I’ll just pay the other guy separately. It’ll end up costing more, but them’s the breaks.
Anyway, the second voice actor, Nick Mortise, finished up his rendition of How NOT To Rescue A Damsel In Distress on Saturday night. Sunday I went into ACX to look at what I need to do now – review and approve it and supply cover art. Then fun thing about cover art is it’s a different size than for an ebook. Ebooks I generally make 2000×3000; the audiobook needs at least 2400×2400, square. So I couldn’t just use the same cover art I had before. And besides, I don’t really like the cover art I had for Damsel, or really any of my Larian short stories. They were done a while ago, and I’ve learned a lot about cover design since then.
Observe:
Not very good, right? They’re not very appealing and they’re not branded for the series (it’s not really a series per say, but they’re all stories about Larian so they ought to be similar) or for author. Genre? I guess they do that ok. But still they needed an overhaul. Since Nick is going to voice all of them (I think) I figured I might as well do the overhaul now.
Here are the new Larian stories covers:
Much better, right? I am a big believer in simple = elegant = better, so I figured I’d just keep the basic design the same, changing only the image in the middle and the title. That works much better for branding too, I think. I like them.
In case your wondering, here’s the cover for the Damsel audiobook:
The same design, but with a different aspect ratio. Looks nice, right?
I only had one concern, once I finished. The new covers looked very similar to the cover for Brother In Law, Brother In Blood. They’re both plain white with black text, with a single image in the center. Brother In Law is not a Larian story, and I worried that the similar designs might cause confusion. For a minute I considered throwing out the new designs, or the Brother In Law design altogether. Then I hit on the answer: just change Brother In Law’s color scheme a bit. A simple transparency layer in the GIMP file did the trick.
It’s not a big change. It’s pretty subtle. I may darken it up a little bit more, but not too much because I don’t want to spoil the image. As it is I think it works to differentiate the branding from Larian. What do you think?
So that’s what I’ve got for now. Look for that audiobook in the next week or so, along with God-Woman, with more audio versions of my short stories to follow. Pretty sweet. 🙂
Have a good one! See you tomorrow for the next chapter of The Pericles Conspiracy.