And Now for the Next One (E-book, I mean). I'm Getting a Taste for This! By Rosalie Warren
Following on from yesterday's post about book covers from Sue Price, I should say I'm delighted with the cover designed for me, at a very reasonable price, by designer and photographer Rob Tysall of Nuneaton.
Rob did an excellent job of bringing alive my somewhat blurry vision of the character Charity from Charity's Child - imbuing her with a wonderful mixture of scariness and vulnerability that for me exactly captures her persona in the book. So huge thanks to Rob. I'll be asking him if he'd like to do some more work for me soon... and that brings me to the topic of my next book...
This one is for adults and it's called Alexa's Song. The publishers of my first novel for adults, Low Tide, Lunan Bay, made encouraging noises at first but then decided that Alexa's Song was 'too depressing'. (Gosh, I'm being my own worst publicist here. Though I actually quite like 'depressing' books...) Not that Alexa really is depressing, of course. It just has 'issues', serious ones, as indeed do most of my books, without my deliberately making any effort to introduce them. I start with characters; the characters grow on the page and reveal their issues in the process.
This, of course, forces me to do research, in order to make sure I've understood the background and got the facts straight. I enjoy research, as I think most authors do, but I always feel guilty while doing it, as it doesn't feel like real writing.
Anyway, Alexa's Song is about a woman who is a talented musician and composer, and a man called Jake, who is deeply in love with her throughout her marriage to someone else and various other frustrating and distressing developments. Jake has bipolar illness, something I very much enjoyed researching. I suffer from chronic mental health problems myself, so I had some background on this, but not precisely on bipolar (I get the lows but not - or not very much - the highs - so it was interesting to investigate the other side of things).
Publishing Alexa on Amazon Kindle and in other e-formats will be part of an ongoing experiment. For the last two days, I've participated in the Electric Authors e-book giveaway, which you may have heard about. I put my novel Charity's Child - Dark Deed or Virgin Birth? on Amazon's KDP Select and offered it for free download on April 23rd-24th.
Although, of course, the downloads are not 'sales', I was gratified to see my ratings soar and, even more so, to receive great reviews and comments on Charity from people I'm pretty sure would never otherwise have thought to read it. So I'm hoping they'll remember my name and look out for more e-books by me, and perhaps even be willing to pay for them. I haven't yet decided on the price for Alexa's Song, but it's likely to be somewhere close to that of Charity's Child, £1.94 ($2.99 in the US).
I'll be fascinated to see if this works. I'm also really excited to find a good cover for Alexa and perhaps discover what she, and/or Jake, really look like. I never quite 'see' my characters while I'm writing them. Almost, but not quite. I hear their voices; I feel I know them like my friends by the time I've finished a book. But their faces are blurry, until someone else nails that cover for me. So watch this space - I hope to reveal Alexa and Jake very soon.
Happy reading!
Best wishes,
Ros
Charity's Child - on Amazon UK and on Amazon USA
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Comments
That cover is indeed superb. I see exactly what you mean about the combination of vulnerability and scariness. How wonderful when a cover designer interprets your wishes so sensitively and accurately.
Dennis.... look at it this way. People downloaded masses of books over that 48 hour period and they will have to prioritise their reading AND their reviews -good or bad. And BTW. I've sold 3 of Voices after 4 days of freebies and had no reviews so what does that tell us.... but let's keep the glass half full mentality. We are getting our work out there, it's a start.
As for reviews, I'm sure you will get some as a result of the giveaway, but it may take time, as Cally says. Not sure about the trolls, though. Unless they are Moomins, I'd rather they stayed away :-)