What lies beneath...

Cover concepts: Phaedor in a half-spin, black Merdanti blade slashing, green eyes alight... Ean standing with Bjorn looming behind him as the Temple of the Vestals crumbles... Trell gazing out over the Sand Sea where the drachwyr fly...

Any of these would be excellent covers for Cephrael's Hand. Unfortunately, I'm not quite important enough to garner a place on Michael Whelan's schedule (his rendition of Anne McCaffrey's The Rowan was the inspiration for Alyneri). I do however have some talented friends who have helped immeasurably in putting a cover concept together. In lieu of hiring a professional graphic artist (and paying professional fees), I'm pretty happy with the cover we came up with.

There's something terribly cruel about book covers. People empirically do judge your book by its cover, even though most covers have more to do with marketing than with the content of the book. It's almost as cruel a truth as the fact that it's easy to get an agent once you have a publisher interested in your book, yet most publishers only accept manuscripts from agented authors. This is a logic that, while circular, is yet incontrovertible.

Artists are always weighing the small adulterations of their work against the price of selling it. Is it more important to have a book cover that truly reflects the material within if, in so doing, the book doesn't sell as many copies? At what point in the process does artistic integrity break? At the other end of the spectrum, you can tweak and nudge and color correct and adjust until you're blue in the face and never actually be happy with the product. That's as true for the cover art as it is for the manuscript contained within. Eventually you have to say, "Enough!" and be happy with the result. Or at least be willing to quit tinkering with it. The rest is out of your hands (and into that expensive marketing team waiting to promote your work onto the NY Times bestseller's list, right?).

Best tea for judging a book by its cover: Egyptian Chamomile

What do we do first?

Well, I've got my outline of actions done. My first steps to implementing this plan involve putting the marketing channels in place to promote the book even while I'm still muddling through the final edit. I've built my author website and have begun researching additional avenues for establishing a web presence.

Getting past that non-existent feeling when you realize that basically no-one knows anything about you or your little book can seem overwhelming. Having a web presence is going to be vital. People need to be able to find you and your book easily, once they do find out about it. That's step 1 - making it easy to find you. Taking your marketing to the next level of wide promotion is step 2.

What gives the big publishers their advantage is they already have lines of communication into bookstores, convenience stores, other chains, etc. where they'll place your book in front of the nameless thousands. The downside of these avenues is bookstores and chains like Target typically want to order books in quantity at a significantly discounted price. So while you may sell more books by having them in these stores, that isn't necessarily going to result in an equal return on your investment.

The big publishing houses also have marketing channels already in place. Coming in as a new author with a new book publishing on your own, you have to create a lot of those channels. Some of the Print On Demand (POD) publishers will sell marketing packages to their authors to help with some of that.

I think it's true for any book that much of the sales will be driven by the promotion each author creates on their own. There's no reason in this media-rich environment that one author can't promote their book and reach as many people as the big publishers do (assuming your novel would be one of the lucky few that such publishers choose to design a big promotional campaign around, which is actually very few of their yearly total). Many of the POD publishers actually do make your book available via Ingram or other wholesalers, so you may still see your book in Target one day.

Perfect tea to contemplate having the best of both worlds: Harney & Sons Wedding Tea (Mutan white tea with lemon-vanilla)

All great ideas start with a cup of tea

It's true, some writers are inspired by scenery, others by music, art, a strange encounter on the street - any number of myriad experiences (just ask a SF author what inspires him and you'll get a whole host of bizarre connections between his toaster and alien mind control). I can't say I'm inspired by tea so much as my writing seems to improve when it's present.

Even so, this blog isn't really about tea (though there may yet be many references to it). I am keeping this blog in the hopes it will prove cathartic as I head into the self-publishing process on my novel, Cephrael's Hand (in bookstores soon!)

I've never been comfortable with shameless self-promotion, though I'm happy to shamelessly promote my yoga class to new students, but it's not quite the same thing as emailing all of your friends and asking them to buy your book even if they don't particularly like the Fantasy genre or even know enough of it to suspect that Cephrael's Hand is not an explicit novel about a young boy's personal struggle with puberty.

So look for more as I forage deeper into the forest of self-publishing armed with only an internet connection and a lovely cup of Harney and Son's Bangkok (green tea with coconut, lemongrass and ginger - an appropriate tea to begin any adventure).