Phil Giunta's Blog, page 100
September 22, 2012
Sci-Fi Day-Olde Towne Books and Brew - Mechanicsburg, PA
My financee and I arrived at about 1PM and I was scheduled to speak an hour later in the Tea Room at the back of the shop. Lawrence had arrived before us and was hanging out in one of the restaurant style booths in front of the shop. Olde Towne Books and Brew is part used book store, part ice cream and coffee shop that resides in what used to be a pharmacy well over 100 years old. Outside the shop, a local Klingon fan club was constructing their Klingon jail and the storefront was decorated with STARFLEET banners and signs.
My talk started at about 2:10 or so with a very attentive audience. After introducing myself and chatting briefly about writing in general and the changes in the publishing industry, I read a brief scene from Testing the Prisoner and another from ReDeus: Divine Tales . I had feared that I wouldn't be able to fill 45 minutes and it turned out that I ran over by about 5 minutes.
The authors' tables were set up in a slightly cramped area in the back of the shop outside of the Tea Room. By the time I left the Tea Room after my talk, both Michael and Darrell had arrived and set up their tables. Evon and I browsed the shop for a bit, and chatted with one young SF fan that also held a deep interest in the paranormal. I also spotted Beryl Washington, captain of the USS Sovereign, a Philadelphia area chapter of STARFLEET, and a few familiar faces from the convention scene.
We ended the day with dinner at the Gingerbread Man on Main Street. Evon and I sat with XO Jim Hutley and Keith Shikowitz, captain of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a New York chapter of STARFLEET. Good conversation and decent food, although the waitress screwed up all four of our orders in one fashion or another. :-)
On the way home, Evon and I stopped off at Bass Pro Shops at the Harrisburg Mall as I needed to pick up some fishing supplies.
Overall, it was a fun day. Nice to see familiar faces and meet new friends. Major Kudos and thanks to Doris Hutley of the USS Susquehannock for organizing the event along with Carl Dietrich, Jim Hutley, and everyone from the chapter.
Above: Phil and Evon and Sci-Fi Day at Olde Towne Books and Brew.
Above: Michael Jan Friedman (left) and Lawrence Schoen.
Michael talking with a fan who had just purchased a book or two (hence Mike's look of glee).
September 21, 2012
Author Interview: Allyn Gibson
What do you get when you cross a Star Trek fan with a Doctor Who fan with a Beatles fan with a baseball fan who also likes museums and hiking? You get fiction and media tie-in writer, Allyn Gibson. Allyn also writes for PREVIEWS, Diamond Comic Distributor's monthly catalog. Find out how Allyn's love of baseball found its way into his contribution to the anthology, ReDeus: Divine Tales...
First, tell us where we can find you online.
I'm very easy to find online. I have a blog at allyngibson.net that I've been maintaining for over ten years now. I have a LiveJournal account (tiggerallyn) that mirrors my blog. I'm also on Twitter (handle: allyngibson) and Facebook. I'm not on Tumblr yet, though I have set up an account (again, allyngibson).
I used to make a blog post every day, but in the last year I've gotten away from that for several reasons. After a decade, I sometimes wonder what more there is to say. Also, there doesn't seem to be a blog readership any more; the kind of personal blogging that was common five years ago (“Here's what I did today,” “Here's what I had for lunch,” that kind of thing) has all but vanished as people have moved that kind of content over to Twitter and Facebook.
This realization has prompted a rethink of what I'm trying to accomplish with my site, so I'm developing a new site that combines a professional “This is who I am, this is what I do, this is what I write” site with a journal-esque blog site. The site design I have now is almost there, but it's clunky because that's not what it was designed for. I have to decide what gets featured, I have to remember what goes where, I'm locked into some kludgey design choices, and content gets lost easily.
What I'm developing now automates the content flow. Blog-type content doesn't get lost, and I've made it much easier for my professional content to come to the fore. While I've done WordPress development in the past, what I'd doing now is beyond anything I've done before.
Longtime readers of my blog will know that I've said in the past that I'm “close to completion” on this redesign since last October, but because I've been pushing myself to learn more about WordPress, even though I've been using it for eight years now, I'll find new and better ways of accomplishing something which results in scrapping work I've done. In many ways, coding this site is like redrafting a novel; I know what I want to achieve, and I have to work out the best way to achieve those goals.
The last summit to climb is Responsive Design – making a site that functions well and looks good on mobile devices and tablets.
The new site probably won't launch until the new year. Migrating ten years and thousands of blog posts won't happen overnight. I'm also planning to launch a podcast with the site relaunch.
Before publishing Star Trek stories with Pocket Books, did you write any fan fiction in the Trek universe or otherwise?
My mom keeps a notebook that I had when I was in fourth grade. In that notebook, there's a story that's set in the world of Arthur C. Clarke's 2010. It would have been in the early 80s that I wrote this, and when I was nine and ten years-old, I wanted the story that led us from the world as it was to the world that was Clarke's. The writings involved Heywood Floyd, and it was illustrated with drawings of space shuttles in orbit working on building the Discovery. That notebook, and a Sherlock Holmes story called “Murder at the Metropolitan Club,” would have been among my earliest stories – and they're both clearly fanfic.
I didn't write much in the way of Star Trek fan fiction as a young writer. In high school, the fan fiction I wrote was set in the world of Isaac Asimov's Robots/Foundation universe. There were two ideas I wanted to explore in these stories. First, how were the Spacer worlds settled and why did they rebel against Earth? Second, were there ever any robots built without the Three Laws. The main character in these stories was a humaniform robot named R.J. Washington who was a secret agent for Earth during the Spacer rebellion. They were inspired as much by the Robot City novels that were being published at the time as they were by Asimov's original work.
I dabbled with Star Trek fan fiction occasionally. The one that stands out was a story called “Foundation and Federation” that brought Data and R. Daneel Olivaw together because I thought that would be cool. In college I wrote spec scripts for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager (one of each) and sent them off to the production offices. When the Strange New Worlds contest started, I began submitting Star Trek stories to that, but none were ever bought. To be frank, none of those stories were any good, though I did pilfer some of the ideas from one of the Strange New Worlds stories for my Star Trek: SCE novella, Ring Around the Sky. There were good ideas in some of these stories – comets covered with Dyson trees, the return of the Moriarty hologram as a computer virus, doomsday weapons set in motion centuries earlier when interstellar wars were conducted at sublight speeds – but the execution was poor.
How did you come to write for the Doctor Who anthology, Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership (Big Finish, May 2008)? Can you give us fellow Who fans a blurb about your story, “The Spindle of Necessity”?
I received an e-mail from Keith DeCandido one evening. He was putting together a Doctor Who anthology for Big Finish Productions, and he wanted to know if I wanted to pitch a story for it. The anthology was going to be about the Doctor's encounters with leaders, and I wrote back and said I'd love to be a part of it. I wrote out a couple of ideas that night, but the idea that I pitched to Keith came to me at about 4 o'clock the next morning. It quite literally woke me from a dead sleep, and I jotted down the ideas that roused me before I lost them. A few hours later, after the alarm went off, I did some rudimentary Wikipedia research to see if the idea would work, I saw that it did, and I sent my pitch off to Keith.
In “The Spindle of Necessity,” the sixth Doctor (he of the coat of many colors and the abrasive personality) meets the Greek philosopher Plato. The Doctor is running for his life – he's been put on trial by the Time Lords and he's seen a dark vision of his future. Plato is running from Athens – his teacher Socrates has been executed, and he's searching for some meaning to life. They meet in a bazaar in Egypt, and Plato tells the Doctor of his mad quest to find the Spindle of Necessity – the axis on which the world turns, which one can ascend to reach the heavens and meet the gods. Plato believes the Earth is the center of the universe, that the sun and the stars revolve around it. The Doctor knows this is madness, and together they embark on a very strange journey. It may just be that Plato – and not the Doctor – is right.
And it's written like a lost Socratic dialogue.
It's a very strange story, if you can't tell from that description. It drove me almost around the bend while writing it. I had a very specific vision for the story, with certain beats I wanted to hit, a gentle, light-hearted sort of thing like Fritz Leiber's “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” but I couldn't make that vision of the story work. Writing it as a dialogue was a last resort, and I tried it, honestly, because I had the deadline staring me in the face. I thought it was such a crazy idea that Keith would find the form of the story unacceptable and he'd give me a month's extension to make the story work. The dialogue, all 12,000 words, was written in two days. Keith loved it. He had me cut two thousand words from it, but otherwise it was fine. The lesson? Sometimes, you really should listen to the crazy ideas in your head. That crazy voice has good instincts.
I was really honored when it was chosen for reprint in Big Finish's “Best Of” anthology, Re:Collections.
You and I both have stories in the anthology, ReDeus: Divine Tales (Crazy 8 Press, August 2012). What inspired your story, “The Ginger Kid”?
When Bob Greenberger approached me about pitching a story for ReDeus, the first thing I did was to say “Yes” even though I had absolutely no ideas at all. I read his pitch document, and I was intrigued. At work, the day that I received the pitch invitation, I kept a notepad on my desk and I jotted down ideas throughout the morning. The first idea I had, which was a pretty good idea, was wholly unsuited to my strengths as a writer, and I suggested to my friend and coworker Lance Woods that he could have the idea if he wanted to approach Bob about a story for ReDeus.
The second idea I had was an idea that Dave Galanter separately came to – in a world where the gods have returned, what happens to the atheists?
The third idea was this – what, exactly, makes a god? Is it their power? Is it the faith and devotion that people have toward them? Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law -- “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” -- came to mind. I've heard it said that humans must seem like gods to our pets. It seemed to me, then, that just because the gods appeared god-like to humans, it didn't follow that they really were gods, that there might be “gods above the gods.” And if there were real gods, off stage and out of human perception, what would they be?
This led me to the Baseball Gods.
I wanted to explore this world from the perspective of the “man of the street.” And I wanted to examine what faith means in a world of incarnate gods. Somehow, a baseball story seemed like the right way to do it.
There were a few direct influences on my thinking. The big one was Ted Chiang's award-winning story, “Hell is the Absence of God.” In this story, the Old Testament god is very real and his angels are very present in the modern world, the afterlife of heaven and hell is visible, and the knowledge of the gods and the afterlife has a definite effect on human behavior. I also had W.P. Kinsella's “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon” in mind. In this story Kinsella, the writer of Field of Dreams, tells about how the Baseball Gods have decreed that the Chicago Cubs winning the pennant and returning to the World Series will usher in the End Times. The Cubs' manager is very aware of this fact, and at a pivotal moment he puts the fate of the world in the hands of his pitcher, knowing that if the Cubs win the missiles will fly. I was also inspired by the baseball writings of Ring Lardner, in particular his story story “My Roomy” about a ballplayer whose roommate on the road has some very strange behaviors. The other inspiration was Michael Bishop's novel Brittle Innings, a fascinating novel about a minor league season in Georgia during World War II – and the discovery that the team's star first baseman is the Frankenstein Monster. All of those sources went into the blender, and from the resulting soup emerged “The Ginger Kid.”
I had some trouble writing “The Ginger Kid,” and it came from an unexpected direction. I'm one of the godless – I came out as an atheist when I was sixteen, and for years before that my beliefs were shaky – and because I've been godless for so long I don't remember what it's like to have faith. Oddly enough, Peanuts came to my rescue, specifically It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. It occurred to me that Linus' devotion to the Great Pumpkin was faith – a strange faith, but faith nonetheless. I put the DVD in, watched it twice, and said, “Okay, I get it.” The Ginger Kid's line in the story about his “sincerity” was a tip of the hat to It's the Great Pumpkin, specifically to Linus' speech about how the Great Pumpkin only visits the most sincere pumpkin patches on Halloween. And when I named the pantheon of Baseball Gods, it made sense to include Charlie Brown's hero, Joe Shlabotnik of Stumptown in the Green Grass League, among them.
Final thought (and final inspiration) on the story. “The Ginger Kid” is a real baseball nickname. It belonged to Buck Weaver, the third baseman for the Chicago White Sox in the 1910s. Weaver was implicated in the “Black Sox Scandal” -- several White Sox players conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series – and was banned from baseball for life. Weaver's only crime appears to be that he knew about the scheme. Otherwise, he was an innocent bystander, and because he did nothing to stop it he was banished from baseball. That story appealed to me, and I liked the idea of an innocent kid caught up in a larger drama of gods and miracles.
I’d be afraid to put you and my fiancée on a Beatles discussion panel. No one else would get a word in! In your opinion, what makes The Beatles’ music so enduring?
Oh, where to start!
No, seriously, I think the answer for the enduring appeal of the Beatles is very simple. It's not the nostalgia for the innocence of the sixties. It's not even that their music is part of the cultural DNA. It's the message of the music. The Beatles' songs, by and large, are about love, life, understanding, and happiness. Yes, they could do rip-roaring rock-n-roll, and they had their avant garde moments, but when you strip the Beatles down, their music is about living, loving, and being. Those are resonant messages for every one of us.
But I do think there's more to the Beatles than their music. Help! (the movie) may be a stoned-out mess, but A Hard Day's Night is an amazing and timeless film that I can watch again and again. Also, if you want to understand the cultural moment of the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night is essential in that it documents what Beatlemania was like in the moment without the retrospective perspective of any documentary on the phenomenon.
Let me make two book recommendations for people who are interested in the Beatles, their music, what they did, and what it meant. First, Tim Riley's Tell Me Why, which is an album-by-album analysis of the Beatles' music and some discussion of the post-Beatles careers of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The latest edition, which came out about a decade ago, covers the Anthology reunion and corrects some textual errors in an afterword. Next, Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, a song-by-song look at the Beatles' recording career, set in the context of an analysis of 60s culture. The third edition, which came out in 2005, is a complete revision of previous editions and includes material on the Live at the BBC and Anthology albums. Of the two books, Riley's is an easier read; it's written for a mainstream audience. MacDonald's book is, in my opinion, the better and more interesting book (MacDonald is a better writer than Riley, and his insights are more incisive), but it's also a little more difficult to read alongside the music; Riley looks at the (UK) albums in the configurations as they were released, while MacDonald looks at the songs in the order they were recorded, completely eschewing the album configurations. They have some vastly different opinions on the music and the Beatles themselves, and while I don't agree entirely with either man, I've found both books to be enjoyable and educational, deepening my understanding and appreciation of the Beatles' music over the years.
What can readers expect next from you?
That depends on the kind of work they're looking for.
I'm published every month. Since July 2007 I've been the writer of Diamond Comic Distributor's monthly catalog, PREVIEWS, and I write between 70 and 80 thousand words of sales and marketing copy for the catalog each month. The September catalog arrived in comic shops at the end of August, and (as I'm writing this) I'll be finishing up writing the October catalog within the coming week.
As for fiction, I'm currently working on a fantasy novel, but I have no timeframe for completion or destination once it's finished. This novel is actually related to the podcast that I plan on launching; the research for the novel's historical and mythical background led me to some interesting material that has been unjustly forgotten that I plan to explore in the podcast.
Also, if there's another ReDeus anthology, I brainstormed several ideas recently that I can pull out and pitch depending on what Bob Greenberger and Aaron Rosenberg are looking for.
What does Allyn Gibson do when he isn’t writing?
Sleep.
That sounds silly, but it's close to the truth. My day job is writing, and I write personally or freelance. I'm always writing. I might be at the keyboard. I might have a notepad. (A third of “The Ginger Kid” was written by hand.) I might be thinking about writing. Or I might be reading because of something I have to write. I'm never very far from words.
When I do take a break from the words, there are some things I like to do.
I love hiking. There's something very nice about disconnecting from the world and getting out into nature. There are some lovely areas near where I live. I don't totally disconnect from writing on these hikes, though; I often take a pocket notebook with me so I can jot down ideas that come to me. I also enjoy taking pictures of nature on these hikes. I used to post photo albums from these on Facebook, but I've realized that my friends probably don't need to see more of my nature photography.
I'm a museum hound. DC and its museums are an easy day trip. Baltimore has some decent museums as well. When I was younger, I didn't appreciate the art museums, but now that I'm older art museums really appeal to me.
Besides coding my own website, I do some freelance WordPress design work.
I'm thinking of buying an electric guitar. There's an electric guitar in the sixth floor conference room at the office, and I keep going into the office just to pick it up, hold it, and pluck the strings. I don't know how to play the guitar, so if I bought one I'd have to learn. There are things I need in life before I need a guitar, and I keep telling myself that. But I know me, and I know there will come a point where I'll pull the trigger.
I really should buy a new bike before an electric guitar, though.
About This Writing Stuff...
For every thing, there is a season...including publishing according to Dean Wesley Smith. For Kristine Kathryn Rusch, content is king...and NYT bestseller Peter David is Pulling Up Stakes!
How to Get 200,000 Page Views in a Year and a Half on a Shoestring Budget by ePublish a Book Blog
Amazon and Book Review Ownership by Shawn Lamb
The Value of Free: Writing for Non-Paying Markets by Chris F. Holm via Chuck Sambuchino
When Should a Writer Stop Marketing a Book? by Jody Hedlund
How to Write Proficiently About Things You Don't Know by Jody Hedlund
Anatomy of a Best-Selling Novel - Structure Part One by Kristen Lamb
Tighten Thy Subplots by Veronica Sicoe
Heroes and Villains by Sophie Masson
The Seasons of Publishing by Dean Wesley Smith
Content is King by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Peter David is Pulling Up Stakes on Crazy 8 Press
Bookmarks!!
September 18, 2012
New Release! Chris Redding's "Incendiary"
Congratulations to Chris Redding on the release of her fifth novel, Incendiary, currently available as a Kindle book with paperback to debut today, September 25!
What if your past comes back to haunt you?
Chelsea James, captain of the Biggin Hill First Aid Squad, has had ten years to mend a broken heart and forget about the man who'd left her hurt and bewildered. Ten years to get her life on track. But fate has other plans.
Fire Inspector Jake Campbell, back in town after a decade, investigates a string of arsons, only to discover they are connected to the same arsons he'd been accused of long ago. Now his past has come back to haunt him, and Chelsea is part of that past.
Together, Chelsea and Jake must join forces to defeat their mutual enemy. Only then can they hope to rekindle the flames of passion. But before they can do that, Chelsea must learn to trust again. Their lives could depend on it.
And check out Chris Redding's previous titles below. Click each image for more information.
September 14, 2012
Author Interview: William Leisner
First, tell us where we can find you online.
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter (@BLeisner), and occasionally on LiveJournal (bill-leisner.livejournal.com)
At what age did you realize your talent for writing and storytelling?
I had played around with making comic strips to entertain my younger siblings back when I was 7 or so. But I didn't really think seriously about writing until my freshman year at Ithaca College. That year, the campus television station was starting up an anthology-style series of original productions and looking for short scripts to produce. I decided to give that a try, so I went to the campus library, checked out a book on script format, and wrote. To my surprise, mine was one of three scripts selected, and I haven't looked back since.
Before publishing Star Trek stories and novels with Pocket Books, did you write any fan fiction in the Trek universe or otherwise?
I actually first dipped my toe into Star Trek fiction by writing and submitting a spec script for Deep Space Nine, back when the producers were accepting unagented submissions. That script got me invited to pitch stories to DS9 and Voyager, but except for one small nibble, I never quite made the cut. I got into fan fiction shortly after, as I became more involved in the online fan community on AOL, publishing in a few print zines and online venues. That served as good practice for when Pocket Books launched their Strange New Worlds writing contest, which is how I finally broke into professional publication.
You and I both have stories in the anthology, ReDeus: Divine Tales (Crazy 8 Press, August 2012). What inspired your story, “The Year Without a Santa Claus”?
In the series bible Bob Greenberger and Aaron Rosenberg sent out to the anthology's invitees, it specified that the ancient gods first returned on opening day of the London Summer Olympics. But it also tied the end of the Mayan calendar, which occurs some five months later, into this world-altering event. So I started wondering what happens at the Winter Solstice that could even come close to the significance of The Return. And with the Solstice falling days before Christmas season, during "the season of miracles," it all came together from there.
What can readers expect next from you?
I'm currently at work on a new Star Trek novel, which is due out next summer (no final title as yet). I also have an original novel in the works -- a historical fantasy set on the western frontier in 1850 -- which I hope to start shopping to publishers in the early part of 2013.
What does William Leisner do when he isn’t writing?
I have a regular office job that takes up most of my waking non-writing hours. Outside of that, I enjoy reading and browsing bookstores, and spending time with friends.
About This Writing Stuff...
Jody Hedlund touches on first drafts while Kristine Kathryn Rusch advises us to worry less about fitting into a definition and just be writers. Lisa Cron cautions us against the biggest mistake writers make. Veronica Sicoe asks how much hard science should be included in science fiction? All that and more!
Also, congratulations to Aaron Rosenberg on the release of the second book in his DuckBob SF comedy series, Too Small for Tall .
Author Pens Attack on the eBook Pirates by Benedict Moore-Bridger
Did Social Media Lead Woman's Assailant to Her Car? by Damon Poeter
Treating Backlist Like Frontlist by David Gaughran
Pricing 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith
The Funny Thing About First Drafts by Jody Hedlund
The Writer You Want To Be by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Writer's Block Myth by Kristyn Kusek Lewis
The Biggest Mistake Writers Make and How to Avoid It by Lisa Cron
How Much Science in Science Fiction? by Veronica Sicoe
DuckBob is Back in Too Small for Tall by Aaron Rosenberg
Covering Covers
Steven H. Wilson
Some interesting thoughts here. The biggest thing I have to contribute -- and I don't hear from too many people -- is that, while you want your cover to stand out, you also want it to look like the kind of book it is. If you put pastel colors and fabric designs on your hard SF novel, no one's going to grok right away what it is. So, while it may seem tragically unoriginal, I'd say there's value in looking at the designs of books that are selling to the audience you want to sell to, and trying to incorporate key elements of their covers. SF books look like no other books, generally. If an SF novel looks like a John Grisham thriller, then SF fans won't notice it on the shelves, and I'd say it's likely that the publisher is trying to take the author "legit," and appeal to a more mainstream audience. Whoever published John Varley's Mammoth novel did this, and I don't think it served the book well. It made me want to read it less, and it didn't say that it was a book by one of the greatest SF writers still living.
Perhaps I speak only for myself, but I'm often drawn in this way. I catch myself looking at a cover because it reminds me of another book I loved.
Spaceships say pulp or hard SF.Closeups of people in costume say character driven adventure.Whimsical color shots of faeries, gnomes or elves say the obvious.Just letters with color say "This is an NYT bestseller. Period."Closeups of jewelry say Danielle Steel.Naked flesh says, surprisingly, not porn, but romance with a little sex.I don't peruse enough porn books to know what says porn. To me, high speed internet says porn.
Aaron Rosenberg
Thanks for including me, Phil! Don't know if you saw it, but I actually did a post on the Crazy 8 site about covers , and specifically about exactly what Steve mentioned--the No Small Bills cover was classy and cool but didn't say "really silly SF" so I changed it completely, going for something that definitely did. I also looked at thumbnails to make sure it would still look fun at that size--one cool thing, a designer friend pointed out, was that at small size you could even more readily see that it was a duck crunching down on the Earth because your brain filled in the rest of the duck's head.
Of course, one thing the article doesn't mention is proportion. As someone who's still primarily a print designer, I still tend to think in those dimensions, going with a 6x9 canvas as a matter of course. But for ebooks you're not really bound to that format. You can go full-on square, you can have a much longer cover, whatever you like as long as you're within the minimum and maximum. That allows for a lot more freedom. Some designs work better square. Others need a longer frame. The cover for For This Is Hell is longer than a print version would be, but that really worked with the image itself.
There's also the difference in materials. With print you're dealing with matte versus gloss finish, the possibility of things like foil and embossing, etc. Ebooks have a flat image, period. That can be a little limiting, but it's also nice because what you see really is what you get. Too often you'll design a print cover and it looks great onscreen and even as a printout but when you see it on the actual book you realize it's too dark or too light or a little off-center or oddly balanced or whatever. With ebooks, the image you create is the final version, and if it looks great on your screen you're all set.
Then there's the ability to change your cover, as I did. It's so much easier to do that with ebooks, since you don't have to recall and pulp extant print copies. That makes it easier to build a brand, as well, since you can have a great idea for a series look with the second or third book and easily and quickly go back and retrofit its predecessors to match. Of course, you have to be careful not to just go back and tinker whenever you get the itch. :)
As you can see, I've got a lot to say on the topic of covers. :)
Howard Weinstein
Interesting idea, Phil -- and that dearauthor.com post was enlightening. Both Steve and Aaron make assorted valuable points. But all that good info convinces me that cover design is about 25% certain rules and guidelines and 75% subjective: how it catches my eye may be totally different than how it catches yours.
Honestly, looking at the "field test" of romance covers [in the Dear Author article], almost none of them stand out to me. So many variations on flowing gowns and heaving bosoms! There are only a couple that don't seem generic and interchangeable. The Wild Montana Sky cover benefits from being set in a specific and different locale. But, among this sampling of genre covers, that and the one with the bare-chested Scotsman are really the only two that dare to be somewhat different. If I were doing a romance, would I really want yet another cover featuring a girl in a fancy dress? Don't they all look pretty much alike?
(I'm also wondering why, on the Midnight Scandals cover, Sherry Thomas's name doesn't match the font-size pattern of the other two names. Am I missing something?)
The best, most-widely-applicable advice seems to be: high-contrast between words and image, and avoiding muddy colors. But the requirement of having title and author's name big enough to be seen in a thumbnail is problematic.
Even on the covers which are supposedly designed with that in mind, you really can't read anything in social-media thumbnail size.
The title and author name would have to take up the entire cover in order to be readable at that size -- and that would look horrible in larger sizes. So, in the age of the e-book, I'm not convinced "one size fits all" is really possible. At best, you'll end up with a compromise.
I also wonder if it's really a good idea for a cover image to be a photo or illustration of people representing specific characters in the story? If one of the joys of reading is using the author's words to conjure your own personal picture of the characters in your head, does a photographic cover rob the reader of that pleasure? Unless it's a biography, might it not be better for a cover to be less literal, to depict something more symbolic yet specifically related in some important way to the story? Like this:
This cover is from the recent historical novel about Doc Holliday. The hat indicates it's a western -- but a hat sitting on a chair in front of a piano hints it's a different kind of western. The arrangement of the elements in the image and the color choice forms a frame around the window, which itself provides a lighter space against which to place the title and author's name, allowing that sought-after contrast which makes the words more readable in smaller sizes.
Phil
I agree that characters should not be depicted on the covers. I prefer to imagine the characters in my head as I read. The only exception in fiction might be media tie-in fiction (we all know what Captain Kirk, Han Solo, etc. look like)
And yes, I couldn't pick out that romance novel's cover in any of the three sets of examples. I had to hunt for it. Not that I mind looking at heaving bosoms...
Steven H. Wilson
Not sure I agree. Again, I think characters being shown on the cover indicate focus of the story. One cover which stands out in my mind as making me stop and pick up a book was the 1970s cover to The Caves of Steel. It's a photo-realistic painting of R. Daneel Olivaw, the robot cop in the story, holding his arm with exposed electronics out at the reader. While the man who modeled for the painting looks nothing like Daneel as I picture him (why would genetically perfect people build a robot with thinning hair and no chin and say he looked like the ideal human?) the image said to me that A) This was SF (which I knew because it was Asimov) B) there's a robot or at least a cyborg in it and, most importantly C) it's about PEOPLE, not concepts, events or technology.
I can't imagine Heinlein's Job or Friday without character covers, or the 2001 series without Whelan's amazing paintings of Dave, Hal and the Star-Child. And of course all the John Carter and Tarzan covers are character covers. Similarly, all the Callahan books have characters on the cover. Almost all historical fiction paperbacks have character covers.
Right now, I'm staring at Timescape on my paperback rack. TERRIBLE cover. A picture of the earth on black? Really? It says nothing at all about the story. It doesn't even say "SF" to me. In fact, it reminds me of one of the many apocalypse-prediction non-fiction books of the seventies. Has there ever been a fantasy cover without characters? Other than the classic covers for Tolkein? Which, BTW, never made me want to even open the books?
Hardcovers are often different, of course. They tend to feature paintings less and font and design work more.
The only reason my Arbiters books (other than Taken Liberty ) don't have character covers right now is that I was looking for a simple, clean design that could be used on multiple episodes, and Ponch's ship art seemed to fit the bill when added to Ethan's colorful, striking, comic-book cover design. My next major Arbiter novel will probably have a painted cover or photo-manip of a character, most likely Atal, since it's an Atal story. It's all about what you want that first impression to be.
Aaron Rosenberg
The question of using a character from the book on the cover is definitely a tricky one. On the one hand, if you have an awesome, potentially iconic character, and can get an artist to absolutely nail him or her, that can really lock the character, the book, and the series in someone's head. Feist's Magician comes to mind--it features Pug/Milamber on the cover wielding magic, and tells you at a glance that this is high fantasy and that he's the lead character. On the other hand, if you can't nail that down perfectly, you might be better off not trying, to leave the character open to reader imagination. Look at the Elric novels, all of which feature Elric on the cover. But he's a brilliant, distinctive, unforgettable character, and the different artists (notably but not exclusively Whelan) capture him beautifully. Any other style of cover wouldn't do those novels justice because they are all about Elric, even beyond what's normal for a novel and its protagonist.
With a book featuring a known character, you have to be even more careful--either you get it exactly right or you don't even go near it. I'm thinking of things like Agatha Christie's Poirot, Robert Parker's Spenser for Hire, etc. In a lot of those cases, though, you don't need to show the character on the front because the readers already know what he or she looks like, and you're better off just going for something that evokes the genre, setting, and mood.
Tie-in books have to feature something straight from the source material. You can't have a Eureka novel without Sheriff Carter on the cover, or a Trek Original Series novel without Kirk or Spock or McCoy or at least Scotty or Sulu. Because really for those you're showing that it's official and contains those familiar faces.
And Howie's point about the romance covers is interesting. It's tough to figure out whether you're going to show exactly what's expected--like heaving bosoms and billowing gowns for a romance--or do something different to catch the eye. I usually think you should try for something familiar but shown a little differently, if possible--a different vantage, a different scale, things like that, so that you make an old visual trope fresh again. For mass markets, clearly a lot of cover designers just go with what they--and the readers--know and expect. It's easy and simple and really can't miss, but it can and often will get lost in the crowd.
Phil
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I don't like photographs of models used as characters. Friday's cover was OK for me as it was a painting or drawing of Friday. To me, when I see paintings of characters on covers, I just look at that as the artist's interpretation. One of Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontiers covers has a picture of Captain Calhoun. It's a photo of a guy posing in a Starfleet uniform holding a sword. I never read any of those books because I just don't have an interest in reading Star Trek anymore but that cover just looked cheap.
Someone bought a paperback copy of Ben Bova's The Hittite for me as a Christmas gift. I would not have bought this on my own. I like most of Bova's SF but this was historical fiction about the Trojan war and the cover had photos of models portraying Helen of Troy and Lukka the Hittite soldier from whose POV the story was told. For some reason, having models on the cover just does not appeal to me. Have an artist paint or draw the characters and while I'll admire the art, I will leave that as the artist's interpretation but the minute you use REAL people to model characters in a book, that seems odd to me, like a models on a magazine cover. They're not portraying the characters on TV or in a movie so why bother using real people?
Howard Weinstein
Steve and Aaron's further observations reinforce my feeling that covers are 75% subjective. If people who write and publish books like character covers, use 'em. But try to make it NOT look like every other cover in the same genre (which most of those romance cover examples DON'T do). For example: Steve, I happened to like your cover for Taken Liberty because it was moody and evocative, so it wasn't generic. My point on this was that a character cover should have SOMETHING specific to the characters or story that sets it apart from others in the genre.
And as this discussion relates to self-publishing, we can probably set aside media tie-in and famous-character books (like the aforementioned Tarzan). Most of us won't be remembered as creators of world-famous "iconic" characters. I certainly agree character covers are expected by readers and probably required with those, since they do help sell the ongoing series of books.
Although, even with Star Trek books, it was a struggle right from the start to make them NOT all look the same. I hated the cover to my first one, Cove nant of the Crown . Totally generic, and not very well done. Once I realized the artists didn't have time to read the books, and nobody really told them much (anything?) about each story -- so all they COULD do was generic illustrations. On my next 5 Trek novels, I did pencil sketches laying out some story-specific possibilities.
The one artist I met was Keith Birdsong , who did many of the Trek covers back then; he said he really appreciated getting some guidance so he could do a more story-specific cover.
With my last stand-alone Trek novel, somebody at Pocket Books never bothered to give my sketches to Keith, so it came out with a generic Trek cover (that wasn't even from the right era). So much for attention to detail by the editors! By the time they showed me the cover, it was too late to change it. Since I DID put in the extra effort to make the cover better, and the editors screwed up, I was pretty annoyed.
I suspect character covers grew out of movie posters, where the stars were typically a big part of the marketing campaign, so you'd certainly WANT their faces on the posters. But books that aren't media tie-ins or about iconic famous characters don't really have "stars" in that sense of the word. That's why I think generic character covers are not necessarily the strongest choice -- even if it's what's expected. Too many cover designers don't seem to put in the extra effort to make the familiar fresh(er), as Aaron mentions.
September 12, 2012
Book Review: The Hittite by Ben Bova
After a long, exhausting battle far from home, Hittite commander Lukka returns with his squad only to find his once proud empire in ruins after a civil war. The emperor himself is dead, his palace burned to the ground. The city has been overrun by looters, murderers, rapists, and bandits.
In a desperate search for his wife and toddler sons, Lukka learns from his dying father that they have been taken by slave traders. Lukka fears that his sons will be murdered, as slavers have no use for toddlers.
Regrouping with his men, Lukka leaves his home and sets off for Troy on a hunch that this is where the slave traders would go to sell their captives. After a wearisome journey beset with battles and tragedy, the squad finally reaches Troy only to find the city under siege from the Achaeans led by the barbarian king Agamemnon and the Ithacans led by the more honorable Odysseus.
Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus, had married the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Yet Helen was disgusted by the barbarian and her life in Sparta had been misery until the day when Prince Paris from Troy arrived to collect tribute while Menelaus was away. Helen had run away with Paris and was accepted as a princess in the Trojan empire, sparking the war between Troy and Sparta.
Lukka and his men find themselves in the service of Agamemnon and Odysseus, though of the two kings only Odysseus spares Lukka any attention. Eventually, Lukka finds his wife, Aniti, and their sons. As Agamemnon is not known for releasing his slaves, Lukka petitions to Odysseus for their release, but his request is constantly delayed as the time never seems right for approaching the selfish king.
Part of the reason for Agamemnon's dark mood is his ongoing feud with Achilles who has refused to assist the king in his siege of Troy. Agamemnon had given Achilles a female slave as a reward for his bravery but then took her back. As a result, Achilles now holds a grudge.
Later, Lukka is selected by Odysseus to convey a message of peace to King Priam of Troy and there, he meets Prince Hector, Paris, and of course, Helen. The message is simple: return Helen to Menelaus and the siege will end. However, the Trojans reject the message and continue to successfully defend their kingdom from daily attacks by the barbarians.
Desperate to assist Agamemnon, if only for the release of his family, Lukka brings his military prowess to bear against Troy by constructing a "siege tower" that will allow soldiers to scale the lowest wall surrounding the great city. The tower is mistaken for a "giant horse filled with soldiers" and the war begins, but can Lukka save his wife and sons? What will become of Helen of Troy?
Having read two of Ben Bova's Voyager series novels and about six from his Grand Tour series (all science fiction), The Hittite was a departure for me. The pacing was much faster, the story focused on a few characters, and it was written entirely in first person POV of Lukka. I'm accustomed to Bova's stories written in third person POV and laden with characters.
I found his protagonist to be somewhat flat and Helen herself was portrayed by Bova as a selfish, spoiled, and somewhat callow woman yet still tragic at the same time. I enjoyed Poletes, an old "windbag" storyteller who is saved by Lukka and becomes his servant. He was the most entertaining character in the book.
Overall, I recommend The Hittite if just for an easy read and interesting twist on The Iliad. Bova does not spare details of the living conditions and barbaric practices of the time. Just do not expect an epic adventure tale or a story of any emotional depth.
September 11, 2012
Reading List for the Rest of 2012
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Stalking the The Nightmare by Harlan Ellison
Reach for Tomorrow by Arthur C. Clarke
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert Heinlein
Voyagers by Ben Bova (I've read the second and fourth book in this series, like them)
Three Days to Dead by Kelly Meding
As Like the Dead by Kelly Meding
Another Kind of Dead by Kelly Meding
Wrong Side of Dead by Kelly Meding
Trance by Kelly Meding
Of course, all of these will be reviewed here on the blog.
