Cover Artist Love: Gene Mollica Studios

Shout out to the awesome team at Gene Mollica Studios who have done the covers for my Immortal Spy series. I've drooled over Gene's work for years. When I had a series for which I wanted a custom photo shoot, he was #1 on my list. He and his team have been awesome from go, inviting me to be a part of the process, explaining to me how things worked. From costume design to choosing the model to the actual photo shoot, the whole experience was ridiculously fun.  When I mentioned my girl was going to have shadowy tentacles in the later books, I expected him to balk; instead, his enthusiasm went up a notch.

Gene has assembled an amazing team who are lovely, lovely people who are excellent at what they do and at making you feel like your project is their priority (even though, psht, you know they're busy AF, but they are super responsive). I give them a cover-input email and my mss in a Word doc. They send me a beautiful finished book. (Okay, yes, there are a few revision steps in between.) Behold the pretty:

I am so pleased with the first three covers, I can't wait to see what Gene & Team come up with for the next four! (Once I write the books, of course.)

In Praise of Cover Artists

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but I'm here to tell you that's a blatant lie. People do it ll the time, whether or not they should.

That's the nature of the beast., A good cover can make or break a book and so can a bad one.

My first few book covers were, well, horrid. I mean that. The publishers asked for cover ideas and it was like they took the best I could offer, tossed it aside and hired their next door neighbor's five-year-old nephew to handle it for them. They were work-for-hire books, but that didn't matter even a little to me. they managed to find the worst possible covers as if to prove something to themselves and to me. What they proved to me was exactly  how much a cover can affect sales.

The thing about being a midlist author is sometimes the publishers give you some control and sometimes they don't. In the small presses I could ask for and often receive the artist of my choice. In the big houses, it was "this is what you're getting."

Somewhere along the way I managed to run across publishers who actually consider your suggestions and, gasp, artists who actually read descriptions. The covers for the entire SEVEN FORGES series and for the TIDES OF WAR are all done by one man: Alejandro Colucci. Alejandro is an amazing talent. he also, gasp, actually reads the descriptions I send his way and then does his very best to follow them. His best, by the way, is stunning, as evidenced by the covers below.

In addition to Alejandro I want to point out the stunning talents of one Dan Brereton. Dan is a longtime friend of mine and has been kind enough to offer up several illustrations for covers of books that I am either self-publishing or doing through a small press. THIS IS HALLOWEEN. ONE BAD WEEK and SLICES are all covers created by Dan. His normal work is in illustrating fro his own NOCTURNAL Comic book, or for Marvel or DC Comics in some circumstances. frankly I don;t know how the man has time tp breathe, because if I were in charge of the hiring of artists, he would never have a moment's rest. 

Trust me: get a great cover and your book will be noticed. Get a crap cover and the book might well suffer here are a few examples of great covers from fantastic artists.

I am very, very grateful!

Meet My Awesome Cover Designer

The Arrows of the Heart

Our topic this week is Cover Artist Praise. An easy topic for me because Ravven is an amazing cover designer. She's done all three of these for me and clearly rocked them all. 

The Snows of Windroven

 Her portfolio speaks for itself. I can add that she's prompt, efficient, delightful to work with and somehow manages to pretty much nail the cover image the first time, every time, with only minor tweaks needed after that.

The Shift of the Tide

I would like to take a moment to clarify that a cover artist and a cover designer are not necessarily the same thing. I was at Bubonicon yesterday and was on a couple of panels about self-publishing and I noticed fellow paInelists and audience members conflating cover artist and cover designer. Basically, a cover artist does the actual artwork and the designer lays out the titles and font, does the spine, and generally adjusts the art to make an effective cover. In this case, Ravven does both, but not all artists can design covers, and not all cover designers can create the art.

Also, I'm excited to announce that I'll soon have another Ravven cover to share! On November 13, we'll be releasing SEASONS OF SORCERY, an anthology with me, Grace Draven, Jennifer Estep, and Amanda Bouchet. I'm 90% sure my story will be from Harlan's point of view. Should be pretty awesome!

Proud to be Living My Writing Dream

The Author of that marvelous
fairy tale

What am I the most proud of in regard to my writing?

The fact that I have twenty five books published and people besides me actually read them. I love notes and comments from readers about how they’ve enjoyed the books!

I’ve always written, since I was seven and did my first self-illustrated fairy tale about a princess with many sisters, flying cats, flying horses and a riverboat captain hero.

My image of a successful writer at that age was Jo from Little Women, writing in a drafty attic. I never understood how she could make a living at a penny a word though, and her choice of Professor Baer always puzzled me.

I envied (and admired) Andre Norton, who was one of my favorite authors and I had the feeling I could write stories too, with science fiction and a lot more romance. Which of course is what I do now.

Not the Author
DepositPhoto 

I NEVER once thought I could make a living as an author. I went through wanting to be a nurse (hello Cherry Ames, RN), an astronaut (hello geometry and trigonometry and goodbye dreams of being a scientist because I can’t “math the sh*t” out of anything), a teacher (because I idolized several of my high school teachers, which led to a disastrous choice of a college which led to my dropping out after a major illness to marry my high school sweetie – ok, there were a LOT of other factors involved in the situation and the marriage part was the BEST thing I ever did….where was I?!)

I got a business degree because my late husband and I were partners and he was so good at long range planning, which started with both of us having degrees, good jobs, then our first house, then a station wagon, then a baby…

I went to work at NASA/JPL because I loved all things to do with the space program, I could work in contracts and related business areas for them…and stayed for a fulfilling and challenging career full of new experiences.

Yes, they got off the roof. Published
many years later, much revised!

But I never stopped writing. Sometimes it went on hiatus for a long time due to life happening, as when my husband was killed in a bicycle-truck accident when the children were 3 and 5…yeah, it’s a family joke how many years my poor characters were stuck on a temple roof under attack by bad guys because I didn’t touch the writing for so long after being widowed…The stories never went away - I was always thinking about plots and ideas because that's how writers are, but all my energy had to go into the daily effort to keep going and keep the family going.

And in 2010 when I had an empty nest after a LOT of life happened, I dug in and decided to make a real effort at becoming published. I had a few rejection slips here and there over the years when  I got brave enough to send something off into the void but had never made a serious, let’s-get-our-craft-skillz-up-to-par effort and attempted to conquer show vs tell and head hopping and a number of other things…

First book sold in 2011.

Published by Carina Press in January 2012.

Self published my first scifi romance in March 2012.

Left JPL to become a full time author in February 2015.

Not writing in a drafty attic for a penny a word, no difficult professors on the horizon to date or court or be courted by…but living the dream! Of course Jo didn't have to deal with the challenges of promo and marketing and social media and the vicissitudes of various ebook seller platforms and all the other things an author of today must juggle...but in general I get to spend the majority of my time working on my novels and I enjoy a lot of the 'other' activities. Twitter is my favorite thing! I just can't let them eat up too much time or I never do get the words on the page.

So there you have it.

Something to Be Proud Of

In May of 1987, I put on a stupidly expensive evening gown that I'd bought (while still in high school) without any hope of ever getting to wear the thing. If you're friends with me on Facebook, you know I have a thing about wildly impractical gowns. Even though my day to day uniform consists of cut-offs, flip flops and a tee shirt, I'm all about every woman buying at least one such gown in her life. I wish I could tell you I'd limited it to one. What I can tell you is that in May of 1987 I finally had a legit reason to wear my silly evening gown out in public. (Yeah, sorry, I have a photo of it, but only that - it's not digitized. I wish. Frankly, it was over the top and slightly garish, but hey. It was the 80s. I was an artiste. O_o)

I got to wear it for a graduation ceremony that almost didn't get to take place.

It was the graduating class from Cornish College of the Arts. My class from the acting department was graduating ten people. Three years before, we'd started with twenty. Of those twenty, only eight remained (we'd gained a few along the way, too.) Attrition was a THING. An acting conservatory sounds like something that ought to be a walk in the park, doesn't it? It was three years of mentally, emotionally, and physically hard, hard work. Long hours. And lots and lots of digging around in your own emotional guts. For a lot of people, it got too hard and they turned away from it.

Yet even for those of us who dug into each challenge, our paths were not necessarily assured. Each year, we had to be invited back to the conservatory in order to continue studying there. We faced three hurdles, GPA, a professionalism score solicited from teachers and peers, and our final hurdle, a frank assessment by the teaching staff as to whether, in their opinion, we had a future in the craft. That last one came down to a yes/no vote. Clear all three and you got to enroll. Fail any one of them and you'd get a form letter explaining that your time at Cornish had come to an end. Don't call us, kid.

Between my junior and senior year at the conservatory, my stats were solid. Yet when my teachers voted on my potential, I split the staff. Half of them wanted me gone. The other half just as adamantly wanted me to stay. The director of the program declined to break the tie and none of the teachers could talk any of the other teachers into changing his or her vote. So, by the skin of my teeth, I got to stay and I got to graduate. I only knew about it because one of the teachers took me aside and told me about it, after. He also told me that the teachers who'd voted to keep me in the conservatory all cited the same reason. Sheer determination and stick-to-itiveness. He said that if success came down to never giving in, I had it in my teeth.

I'd had no idea that I'd made that impression on anyone - that I was determined (I was). I was disconcerted, and maybe a little defensive about nearly being kicked out, but I was also proud. It was another challenge that made me work all the harder that final year. And I was prouder still to get to graduate despite the doubts of half of my teachers.

This story plays directly into what I'm proudest of in my writing. I won't give up. I've stuck to it and will continue to. Slings, arrows, and outrageous fortune notwithstanding. I keep on keeping on. I have story gripped in my teeth, and I am that bull dog that will not let go. There's no graduating this time. And no one voting over my fate. Just me and the stories. Which in some ways is too bad. Because it means not getting to wear another silly evening gown in public.

I vote we create a writers tea somewhere fancy. White tie. Impractical evening gowns encouraged. We gather once a year to celebrate everyone who stuck with writing, no matter what. Determination. Stick-to-itiveness. That's something to be proud of.

Best Editor Sheila Gilbert

People, I'm so proud that the SFF Community has confirmed the thing that I've known for some time: that Sheila Gilbert at DAW is the BEST Editor.  She's now won the Hugo twice (and has been nominated six times), and she is hands-down amazing. 

Plus: CHECK OUT HER ACCEPTANCE SPEECH.

For real.  THE BEST.

Exile of the Seas - available for preorder!

"To say that Exile of the Seas exceeded my already high expectations would not do the book justice." ~Brenda Murphy, Writing While Distracted

Read an Excerpt

Around the shifting borders of the Twelve Kingdoms, trade and conflict, danger and adventure put every traveler on guard . . . but some have everything to lose.
 
ESCAPED
Once she was known as Jenna, Imperial Princess of Dasnaria, schooled in graceful dance and comely submission. Until the man her parents married her off to almost killed her with his brutality.

Now, all she knows is that the ship she’s boarded is bound away from her vicious homeland. The warrior woman aboard says Jenna’s skill in dancing might translate into a more lethal ability. Danu’s fighter priestesses will take her in, disguise her as one of their own—and allow her to keep her silence.

But it’s only a matter of time until Jenna’s monster of a husband hunts her down. Her best chance to stay hidden is to hire out as bodyguard to a caravan traveling to a far-off land, home to beasts and people so unfamiliar they seem like part of a fairy tale. But her supposed prowess in combat is a fraud. And sooner or later, Jenna’s flight will end in battle—or betrayal.

  Available September 04, 2018

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Proud of My Protags

Of what am I most proud in regards to my writing?

I am most proud of the protagonists I write. They're strong women who are flawed but not TDTL. They're decision makers who own their mistakes. They're brave without realizing anything less is an option. They're supportive even when they have nothing to gain. They are relatable...including the one who eats rocks and bleeds fire.

Yes, a lot of female protagonists have those traits these days, which is marvelous and inspirational because it shows the bar for female characters is being raised above the "usefulness to men" standard. More than the maid-mother-whore boxes they used to rattle around in, contemporary character-driven plots with women leading the story aren't about being worthy of dick. (Hell, there's an upsurge of protags who don't even like dick.) It's not to say that romance isn't important or of interest to these modern story-drivers; quite the contrary. Relationships and connections of all kinds are crucial. However, female protagonists are no longer servile lumps of moist clay; they're reaching through the pages to demand more. They're saying, "appreciate my awesomeness or GTFO."

When we're living in a real world where the leadership of the patriarchy is reducing women to the categories of beautiful, disgusting, or animal, it's good to have women leading stories who DNGAF.

If you want to know what makes my writing unique...well, I have a female protagonist who eats rocks. The weird just goes from there.