Cover Update for "Haunted House Flipper"

I updated my cover again. I added a ton of blue to it to give it more of an urban fantasy, supernatural feel. I like it a lot more and I think it will fit better next to book covers of similar books which is what you want. Hopefully I'm only a few busy weeks away from publishing this bad boy!

Haunted House Flipper Updated Cover

This is the current iteration of the cover of the novel I'm working on. I added a demon behind our hero Ray. He doesn't look too happy that there's a weird human with an angelic blade in his mansion.

Merlin and the Pendragons | The Story Behind a Book Cover

I had the pleasure of creating the book cover for Merlin and the Pendragons by podcaster and author Chris Moody. We started with a castle as all fantasy stories do right? He had a certian nineteenth-century Romanesque Revival palace in mind called the Neuschwanstein Castle located on a hill over the village of Hohenschwangau near Füssen in southwest Bavaria, Germany. So I went digging and found a great picture of it on Pixelbay that was in the Public Domain which means we could legally use it for commercial purposes.

I left the color of the photo alone and found a medieval fantasy looking font. I also tried seeing what the cover would look like without the medallion. It looked alright but left something to be desired. Chris thought so to. It wasn't there yet.

Then I went and looked at book covers of the other stories in The Chronos Files for style inspiration. The medallion you see above the author name I constructed from scratch in Adobe Photoshop. I grabbed the teal color from one of the other Chronos Files books and then worked on giving it a kind of glowing effect. I added bevels to the metal parts and kept adding layers until all the parts were there. Then I made a new layer in photoshop and splashed a teal to white gradient from bottom to top on it and changed the layer style to Hue to give the whole image that bright teal look. I also added a teal gradient on the top of the image which faded into zero opacity to brighten up the sky and make the title text stand out more and which also made it clearer and easier to read. I also found a new font that looked similar to the fonts used on some of the other Chronos Files stories. Then it was almost done.

Chris mentioned that Amazon would be putting on the Kindle Worlds square logo in the bottom left which might require some things to be moved around. So I copied that off of another cover and temporarily put it on our cover. It showed me right away that Chris's author name needed to be moved to the right and that the medallion needed to be smaller and moved up and to the right. Both would have been partially covered by the square Kindle Worlds logo. Then it was done!

This was a really fun cover to work on and I gave Chris a killer price. I'd love to do the same for you if you find yourself in need of a book cover for your story. Check out my hire me page for prices. You'll find that they're incredibly reasonable if not the cheapest around. I've been on Chris's cool author interview podcast called PodioMedia Chat a couple times so he got a really steep discount as my way of giving back to the podcast community. If you see my prices and still have trouble coming up with some change I've also been known to trade for covers. Shoot me a line and I'm sure we can work out a deal. I'm always in need of people to read my stories and give me feedback and edits! As always, thanks for stopping by.

Buy Chris's Book Merlin and the Pendragons at Amazon

Visit Chris's Website

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Luigi's Chinese Delicatessen | Book Cover

Check out the latest cover I had the privilege of making for Jim Vines! Here's a link to his book. The guy's an experienced screen writer so you know his novel is going to be awesome.

The Light Beyond the Window

I've been trying to find an image to inspire a new short story for the past few days. I've found that some of my best short stories come from the photo story prompts over at www.EveryPhotoTells.com. So I set out to find an image that would inspire a story and I think I've found one. I whipped up a cover with it. Now to write the story. I have a few ideas in mind. We'll see where it takes me. It's been a while since I've written a short story. I'm excited to see what I can come up with. You'll be sure to see links to it as a free Ebook and as an audio version through my podcast. Thanks for stopping by!

The Cover for my Next Story

This is the cover for the short story I'm currently writing. Hopefully it will be accepted by the Every Photo Tells duo and they'll podcast it beautifully. It was inspired by their November photo. Okay, now back to writing it! Thanks for stopping by.

Dying Wish | Book Cover

Original Cover

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Updated Cover

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Trying A New Font

Back in 2011 in the month of November I wrote a 25,000 word novella during NaNoWriMo. It's a young adult fantasy adventure story. Here's a brief synopsis:

A young man is left alone after his father dies defending him from slave traders who came through their village. Now he must journey back to his father's homeland to fulfill a promise to bury his father among his family. Along the way he saves another boy from the slave traders, and becomes a man as he finds his way back to his father's homeland to meet his relatives for the first time.

As it lies on my google drive now it is a completed first draft. I plan on rereading it soon and seeing just what I've got now that it's had lots of time to cool. If it's good enough I think I'll revise it and then get it in the hands of beta readers and eventually publish the thing. That's had me thinking about the cover, and so I came up with this. What do you think? I'd love your feedback. Thanks!

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UPDATE

I have since changed the name of my novella from "Dying Wish" to "Sword and Urn." I also made a completely new cover that fit the title better:

eBook Anthology Cover

Do you like A, B, or C?

You can click on an image to bring it front and center, then easy switch between the two. Thanks for your comments!

UPDATE - Thanks to some great feedback I've simplified the cover. Check out C at the bottom of this post.

A

B

C

A New Book Cover for My Novella

Happy Valentine's Day! Show that special someone you love them today. I don't mean just buying them something, I mean sitting down and snuggling and just telling them how wonderful they are and how your life is so much better because you have them.

As many of you know I'm revising what will be my debut novel right now, and I'm getting closer to finishing it, but something I haven't talked about is the novella I'm currently writing. I've been writing the first draft of a middle grade adventure novel. I wanted to write something like the fun Hardy Boys books I read when I was a little kid.

Here's the synopsis from my Projects & Progress page:

A boy goes to stay with his grandma for the summer since his mom works full time soon after his grandfather's death. Grandma tells him that she doesn't know where their cat goes all day, but that he only comes back in the house at the end of the day to eat. He investigates and finds the old cat goes to grandpa's old tool shed where he spent most of his time. Sometime later the cat never comes home and is discovered to be badly injured. The vet keeps him overnight and says he's been in a fight with a wild animal. Soon after the cat is home and felling better it goes out and doesn't come home again, but this time it can't be found anywhere. Our hero attempts to find the cat, and what has happened to him.

Anyways, last fall I took a ton of pictures of the old shed next to my back yard in hopes I could use one as the cover for this story. In creating the cover I came up with a final title as well. I like the angle and the way the grass sticks up at the bottom. It will be a fun story to record in podcast form. I think I'm going to try something that I've never done before for the podcast version too. I'm going to write and record songs for it. It will be like in a Disney film, where the story is moving along and then all of the sudden the character busts out in song. It's an idea that just sounds like too much fun not to try and I'm excited about it.

Thanks for stopping by the blog. I hope you enjoyed Jeff Hite's TV Memory guest post as much as I did. There another one from another awesome guest for many more Friday's to come. Next up will be my friend and fellow writer Tim Ward.

And Another! (Book Cover)

My friend and fellow writer J.R. Murdock, author of such great books as V & A Shipping, Billy Barbarian, Astel, and a great collection of short stories called Murdockian Tales, asked me to create a cover for one of his new short stories called Grandpa's Little Red Barn. As of the date of this post it is currently free so snag it while you can. Also, those first two titles are available for free in audio and I highly recommend them. They're very entertaining romps, a great time. Some other covers for this great author are in the works - you'll see more on that in later posts in early 2012. I'll just say he's going to be busy cranking out lots of fiction next year. I'm excited. Next year will be the year of my debut novel and I have plans to also release a novella. Yes 2012 is going to be a great year for fresh fiction my friends. For this cover I was happy that J.R. had a clear vision of what he wanted. He knew what he wanted the font to look like, where everything should go, and he even provided the photo I used. I desaturated it a bit so it was no longer stop sign red, and then snagged some of the front wall to create the "RED" text in the story title text. It was fun and we both like how it turned out. I'm really excited for another cover I'm doing for him which is much more involved and included several painted illustrations to make the final image. It's going to be awesome!

I Found Artwork for my first Novel!

I'm an artist. I can do 3D and Photoshop and all that stuff. I've created eBook covers for others. So of course I'm going to make my own book cover right? Well I was going to, but at this point in my life - I barely have time to write. So I've been surfing images at Deviantart.com for the past month or so, and I finally found THE image for my first novel release. The ship is somehow exaclty what I describe in my book. The perportions are dead on, there's a huge chuck of ship that's cargo area in the back - it's perfect! I asked Eric the artist if I could use his amazing artwork for the cover of my book. He said that I could, all I have to do is send him a copy of the book when it's done. I will send him a signed copy in the mail, and email him all the eBook formats. A small price to pay for his breathtaking piece of artwork to go on the front of my novel. Click on it to see it in a larger size. If you're interested you can see the process he went through to create this piece here, something I'm always interested in being an artist myself. So thank you Eric!