Joshua Banker's Blog, page 5

Permanent price cut for select eBooks on Amazon.com

To go along with the expanded distribution of Not Gods But Monsters, the future addition of A Prison of Flesh for the same, and the upcoming release of Book 3, both Books 1 and 2 in the Realm of Tah’afajien series are now permanently discounted on Amazon’s Kindle eBook marketplace.

Not Gods But Monsters is now $4.99.

A Prison of Flesh is now $3.99.

Also, expect both A Prison of Flesh and The Fifth Era of Man to be added to Smashbooks’ catalog in the next few weeks.

Not Gods But Monsters eBook to have expanded distribution

Catchy title, right? The kind that explains it all so succinctly.

Using Smashwords, I've submitted the eBook version of Not Gods But Monsters to be available to a growing distribution of retailers, including Kobo, Scribd and Apple. The title should start showing up on theses retailers' websites over the next couple days.

What it actually means

Originally, all of my eBooks were published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for Amazon's marketplace. Because of this, each of the titles were enr...

Win a Digital Copy of The Fifth Era of Man on Goodreads (Aug 17 - 31, 2018)

Visit Goodreads.com from August 17th - 31st, 2018 to be able to enter in Giveaway Contests for one of 100 Kindle (MOBI) copies of The Fifth Era of Man .

Much like last time, where we gave away copies of Not Gods But Monsters and A Prison of Flesh, we're back to sponsor another eBook giveaway at Goodreads. The winners, all 100 of you, will receive MOBIs delivered directly to your Kindle library at the end of the contest.

Click below to be taken directly to the giveaway page. While you're there, a...

The Process: Creating a Cover Painting (Part 2)

Part the second, which goes after part the first. If you haven't read the first part, go here to get an idea of the steps taken to reach this point.

At this stage, with the sky box and distant background elements close to completion, all work shifted to adding details to the foreground structures.

Stage 7

Detail work for the bridge was a multi-step process where architectural elements are approximated. Brighter colors were added to the foreground structure as a base. The pink/flesh band there?...

The Process: Creating a Cover Painting (Part 1)

Before each book can be prepared for print, a cover illustration must be created. A lot of the time, this happens well in advance of a tangible release date. While the illustrative work for some of my other books has been largely character-focused, for this project I wanted to try something a little different.

As such, I set about to record the steps in creating this piece.

This illustration is for a future stand-alone (read: not Realm of Tah'afajien) novel, slated for release some time in 2019...

Digital Sketchbook: Various

For those of you following my Instagram account, you probably know I recently purchased Wacom Intuos tablet/pen in an attempt to work on more digital pieces. As someone whose spent multiple decades as an exclusively-physical media person, this took time, like relearning how to walk. In that time, I've pulled together a handful of various character and creature sketches.

Below are the un-cropped pieces (without Instragram's weird picture image size limitations).

Character Sketch: Oebe Nsu-Ogette...

Fifth Era Sketchbook

Unlike my previous books, where there was sizable effort to produce support artwork as part of the world-building process, the development of The Fifth Era of Man took on a more minimalist approach. While there are no character illustrations, a small batch of sketches were created for some of the armor and weaponry found in the story.

As you can tell from the illustrations below, there was a concerted effort towards Roman and Egyptian influences in the designs.

"Standing before them was the eff...

The Fifth Era of Man - Semanifestures

One of the major elements of The Fifth Era of Man is the usage of semanifestures by the Progenitors known as Prae and Erudatta. This special ability, while having all the appearance of magic, is rooted in the experience of a highly-advanced scientific society.

The term semanifesture is a portmanteau of manifestation and semantics ("of or relating to meaning in language"). Its use in the story is intended to mean "the creation of written symbols to produce a visible form." Each semanifesture, o...

Map of The Fifth Era of Man

Much like what was done for Not Gods But Monsters, a part of the pre-writing process was spent creating a visual representation of the world. As you can tell by the numerous locations that didn't make it into the book, a lot of this was done purely for reference. I find it easier to make a world feel fleshed out if characters comment on the world at large.

Early on, the map was done as a quick sketch (below) meant purely for reference.

Note: Of course this is not to scale.

Once everything was lo...

The Art of TFEOM: Cover Illustration

For my first stand-alone title, The Fifth Era of Man, it was my thought to try something different for the cover artwork. Unlike previous books, I shied away from a more traditional painting, instead choosing to do a mixture of hand-drawn ink on paper and digital color.

Stage 1

At this point, the illustration is solid black on white, with no color. As you can tell, I did not fill in the horn and the crown of the head.

Stage 2

After scanning the image in, I used Photoshop to fill in the helmet wit...