Focusing on Book #3

[Kevin]

It’s January. Those of us with day jobs have returned to work, a valiant effort has been made to get the Christmas decorations packed up in some kind of order, and it’s time to publish the third book in my trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Culling. For those of you who haven’t read the first two books― Any Tomorrow: The Calling and Any Tomorrow: The Curse (and that’s just about everyone)―I won’t spoil it buy giving away the plot. I’ll just say that the action doesn’t stop and the twists and turns in the plot keep right on twisting and turning until the very end.

But before I can publish Any Tomorrow: The Culling I need to work up some satisfactory cover art. I like the cover art I created for the first two books, but I think that for a series of books like this there really needs to be common theme. All the covers shouldn’t be identical, but I think a reader should be able to quickly identify which books are mine amid a dozen or so displayed on an Amazon search results page just by seeing the cover images without searching for title or my name. Wouldn’t you think that’s a reasonable expectation of good cover art?

Towards this end I started revising the first two covers and designing the third. I think I’ll be able to do it before January runs out of days. I may have to enlist the help of my son who works with Photoshop much more than I do, but that’s okay. At least I’ll keep it in the family.

In the meantime, I’m also working a couple of other projects. I have another short-story, ‘Smashing Mailboxes’, I’ll be submitting to eFiction Magazine (http://www.efictionmag.com/) either tonight or tomorrow. Speaking of that, Doug Lance at eFiction has changed the format of the website again. Now when you go to the site you can actually read a new story each week on the home page. Hopefully you’ll see ‘Smashing Mailboxes’ displayed there soon.

I’ve also started writing intensively on what I think might turn into another novel. I haven’t gotten far into it (only about 8,000 words), but it’s starting to grow a life of its own much the way the Any Tomorrow novels did. I let you know what happens.

Shameless promotion: My novels, Any Tomorrow: The Calling and Any Tomorrow: The Curse, are available from leading eBook distributors such as Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.

If you would like to share your ideas about what I’ve written, feel free to contact me either on my blog or using other social media. Thanks.

Reposted to Goodreads from my blog― http://anytomorrow.wordpress.com/

[Barbara]

Are you still using photos for the book covers? Have you considered a frame that looks similar but isn't identical to show all the books are in the same series?
Shameless self-promotion: see how I've done my different "collections" - the five novels have similar-but-different covers, the short story collections have other frames and the upcoming novels for this year will use the same kind of frame of "Starblazer" whis is set approximately at the same time. I draw my own covers (except the five Books of the Immortals, which were drawn by a friend - and yes, I paid her, and asked her to do a frame same-but-different on each) and have prepared a few "frames" to put the drawings in... but then, I do fantasy (although the frames are Art Nouveau, LOL), so it might not fit your genre.
I also did the other Unicorn Production covers, BTW...
Link to my Smashwords profile: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/vie...

[Kevin]

I checked out your smashwords page. Very nice and it's definitely given me some ideas for my next series. Thanks