This Is Hardcore

I was recently invited to participate in the beta program for KDP hardcover publishing. Having been blessed with special favour from "Jeff" I felt it behooved me to explore the opportunity so I decided to make a hardback version of my book Weft available.

Feel free to order your own copy of Weft here.

The process of creating a hardback cover in KDP will be very similar to those that have endured the mental torture of the paperback process. A paperback cover file will not suffice and a new .pdf document with larger dimensions must be created. Scaling up the paperback file will not work as the alignment of the spine text may no longer be correct. There is a new and different Excel template available from Amazon to assis with this.

A further complication is that author copies are not available for order and it only appears to be possible to fulfil hardback orders for delivery in the United States. However the overall product looks very good and I am happy with the result.

Special thanks to Sarah Waites at Illustrated Page Book Design for helping with this project.

Cover Story

When I first published The Zhala Trilogy I had the notion that I wanted them to look austere and anachronistic. In particular I was attracted to the aesthetic sensibility of the designs Romek Marber did for Penguin paperbacks in the 1960s. To me they communicated a stylish austerity that complemented and, at the same time, partially concealed each book's subject matter. So with character art commissioned from Brent Skinner that's what I did. I made my Marber Grid template and created my covers being very much pleased with the end result. The font used on all of the cover text elements was another wilfuly bleak choice and, in a final iconoclastic, flourish I reversed the normal orientation of the spine aping the style of a Russian or French novel.

While the covers greatly appealed to me it had somehow slipped my mind that I'm not the person who's supposed to be buying these books. Something more professional and commercially compelling was required. New covers were commissioned from Sarah Waites who did an absolutely oustanding job of capturing the essence of the books. The colour sequence of the originals has been retained in modified form and the character on the cover of the final book switched to Zhala from her father.

A DYING KING

Like the Beatles with LSD I've decided to strike out in new directions and experiment with KDP in the hope of a breakthrough. I'm not saying it's better than Revolver but it's certainly a work of comparable artistic and cultural merit.

Buy it on Amazon.

On Submission

The manuscript of Without a City Wall has been polished until it glistens like the hoard of Croesus and the proposal has been honed to a vorpal edge. So, this is it, we push it out into the cruel but hopefully not indifferent world to find its fortune with ten different publishers.

Now we wait. And wait. And wait. You get the idea.