First off, I’m happy to say that Stars of Blood and Glory is coming along quite nicely. I’m currently finishing up with the last couple of chapters, and should have the first draft done by the middle of next week. Hopefully by then I’ll know if and when I’m starting my TEFL job overseas, but I’m sure I’ll have it finished before then.
This first draft is pretty rough, so I’m sure it’ll be a while before it’s up and ready for you to read. For some reason, this draft is extremely short–I doubt it’ll be much longer than 80,000 words. I don’t know if that means my writing has gotten tighter since Bringing Stella Home, or if I’ve unintentionally left too much out. I’ll probably let it simmer for a few months, do a quick revision, and send it out to some first readers, just like I’ve done for Heart of the Nebula.
In the meantime, I’m getting really excited to pick up work again on Star Wanderers. I’ve been workshopping part II in Kindal’s writing group, just to get some reactions. I’ll probably revise that part while I’m writing parts III and IV, getting it ready for publication after I hear back from Writers of the Future according to the serial model I outlined previously.
I’m so excited, in fact, that I went ahead and made some mock-ups for the cover art!
Pretty cool, huh? These make me sooo happy. 🙂
I’m not quite sure if this is the right design, though. Star Wanderers is very much a science fiction romance, and while these covers definitely scream “science fiction!” they don’t really seem to say “romance!”
My original idea was to use these as backgrounds and commission an artist to do some character portraits from the waist up, using one portrait each for the foreground. But then again, that might make the covers a bit too complicated. I can always redo the first one to get rid of the planet, keeping the galaxy–the other ones probably wouldn’t be so bad with a character in the middle. But then again…
I don’t know. What do you guys think? If you saw one of these covers while browsing for ebooks, what kind of impression would it give you, and would you be interested in checking it out?
(By the way, I made the covers with Celestia. Coolest. Space simulation. Ever.)
EDIT: I decided to redo the first cover; the planet wasn’t quite doing it for me. I’m not sure if that means I should redo the cover for the third part, since that one is a heck of a lot more colorful than the others…hmm. We’ll have to see.
No, romance doesn’t come to mind with those covers.
Although my book covers look military and the genre is space opera.
I think the covers seems a bit too dark. Doesn’t really catch the eye right off, which is what you need to go for with a cover. That was one of my misgiving with you turning it into a five part serial–the need to comission five covers for one work. The other thing I worry about is that you will confuse readers. Amazon doesn’t really have a function for explaining the whole serialization to people and I think confusion stops readers from buying books. Just my perspective on the downside of a project like this.
Yeah, the covers probably are a bit dark. Hopefully, that won’t be a problem if I can put an illustration of a character in the foreground of each one. Maybe that will also make it look a bit more like a science fiction romance.
Expense for cover art is definitely something to look out for, though I think it may be cheaper to commission four character illustrations than one complete cover. I’ll need to look around on Deviant Art to figure that out. My main reason for wanting to serialize this stuff is to see if it’ll help me to put more work out faster, as well as build a good email list for the newsletter and increase my visibility. Either way, I’ll definitely have to keep in mind whether I’m confusing readers, as well as whether I stand to lose money by releasing everything under the 70% royalty mark (Smashwords actually lets you distribute at $.99 to Barns & Noble and other markets at a 65% royalty rate, not sure if that includes Amazon). But yeah, I’ll have to keep all of that in mind.