Keith Robinson's Blog, page 26

Mountain of Whispers final book cover!

Thanks to all the comments received about the Mountain of Whispers cover, I realized how silly it looked with the original dragon. The smaller dragon looked slightly better but a few people suggested I'd swatted a bug and ruined a perfectly good scene. Sadly, they were right.

So I set about finding a better dragon. There were two problems with this. The first problem was finding a decent dragon that resembled the one used on the cover of Labyrinth of Fire. The second problem was finding a...

Mountain of Whispers cover update

Back in October 2009, when I was getting ready to launch Labyrinth of Fire, I decided that a cover depicting a tunnel wasn't exciting enough, so I added a whopping great big dragon to the scene. It proved successful, and is the favored cover of most younger readers (rather than the foggy Island of Fog cover, which is mysterious but necessarily monster-free). With this in mind, I've added another whopping great big dragon to Mountain of Whispers.

Click for Larger View
(Note: this has since...

Books can be ordered at Barnes & Noble

I had a VERY exciting conversation earlier with Adam Anderson, a customer relations manager with Barnes & Noble in the local area. I met him at the recent Summer Reading Kickoff, and when he introduced himself, I immediately gave him copies of Island of Fog and Labyrinth of Fire.

He's now finished reading Island of Fog and says he loved it. He said it "stands apart" from other similar fantasy books and he strongly believes customers will enjoy it if only they can get hold of it. So he's...

You can't rush a genius...

...and you can't rush me either! As I waited for my two proofreaders to do their thang on Mountain of Whispers, I wondered if I could get away with light line edits this time. Alas, no such luck! For the most part there's nothing major to change, but there are a few minor loose ends and seemingly irrelevant ideas to clean up, plus one major scene that will certainly require a rewrite of one complete chapter (something I'll be tackling tomorrow).

This is all good, though. Labyrinth of Fire

Look, I can't help being British

The most time-consuming part of the editing process is done and Mountain of Whispers is well into the final proofreading stage. I've already had the first half returned by one proofer, complete with dozens of little marks and comments. Nothing major, just missing words and commas, an unnecessary exclamation mark or two, a few word repetitions... the sort of thing that takes seconds to fix IF spotted in the first place, hence the need for a second and third pair of eyes.

Don't forget you can ...