Thursday, December 6, 2012

A New Cover for Murder at Zero Hour






Does anyone sense a theme here?  Anyway, my popular WWI mystery freebie is receiving a facelift.  The content is the same but book cover isn't. Once again, I feel a better cover will lead to more sales, er giveaways.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Lastest Book Update


 A working title has been selected but it's still subject to change.  I've also finished the book cover but won't be revealing that until the day of publication.

So far I've churned out over 75,000 words but the end is now in sight.  With just a few more chapters and a climactic ending to wrap everything up, it's nice to see the end of the tunnel.  I'll be looking for an end of winter release which is a little later than my original schedule.  I was hoping for a Christmas release, but time and other projects have slowed down my normally aggressive writing production.  With my wife finishing school, moving to a new house, various work issues, and my stereo hobby, I just haven't been able to devote the time

Returning to the subject of book covers, I've decided to revamp a few of mine.  Since my one bad experience of waiting impatiently for an artist to finish his work, I've always done my own using modified public domain pictures.  This worked for historical novels, but no so much with my works set in more modern or future times.  I've since taken to scouring Dreamstime for pictures and drawings that fit what I see as representing the words inside my books.  The cost is quite affordable - much more than I expected - and it ended up being way cheaper than paying someone to do the work.  I still do the layout and font work using iPiccy and Microsoft's PowerPoint.

Check out this blog post for more background on the process of using PowerPoint.

A New Cover for Horror America


Using Dreamstime for photos has turned out much better than my uh, limited artistic skills.  Font and layout was created via Powerpoint - which is a surprisingly strong tool for this type of work. The number of fonts is limited, but another option is to use iPiccy, which has a wide range of effects too.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

A New Cover for Malediction


Using an image from Dreamstime and Powerpoint, I've created a new book cover for Malediction.  Except for the older Jack Blackwood material, I'll be revamping all of my covers to give them a better look.  This in turn should hopefully improve sales.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Project Communique - Slave Damage

Project Communique - Slave Damage by ProjectCommunique

I've been working on other projects, straying away from the synth thing.  But last night I fired everything up and started recording.  Here is a sample from that session.