run to the breakers

So I got my hands on the new cover art for Skeleton Army today, and personally I think it looks pretty great. Huge recommendation to the guy I hired to do it, Arthur Wang. Link to his elance page, which has some examples of his work. He was great to work with, and I think he ended up with a pretty good final product.

The title and name are just a mock-up and will probably end up different in the final version I sent to print

A lot of stuff coming up real quickly: last week I hired an artist to do the cover art for Skeleton Army, today or tomorrow I’m sending off the manuscript to my editor for a run-through, couple weeks and nanowrimo will be upon us (and with it, the writing of the sequel to SA, Locks of Clay.)

Once the cover art is done I’ll probably throw up a little teaser, though I probably won’t FINALIZE the design until december. So far I like the guy I hired and I really like the direction he’s going with the art. Expect a strong recommendation at the end of the job, if things continue the way they’re going.

Looking forward to finally getting the manuscript to my editor too - can’t wait to get it back and get going on the next draft either.

And of course I’m chomping at the bit to get going on Locks of Clay.  I’ve got notes scattered across three different laptops, so I need to get them consolidated.  But so far I feel like this one will be light years better (at least in the first draft) than the first one.

This weekend I settled on an editor. In addition to providing editorial services he also maintains a blog in which he discusses different topics relating to the publishing industry and writing in general, in addition to posting book reviews &c. From reading the blog posts and conversing with him via email he seems like a pretty good guy, and I really liked the sample edit he did for me and the ideas he’s already had about the book.

Some of my test readers have expressed confusion as to why I’m hiring an editor. When they do that I laugh and laugh.

Because while the book is perfectly readable, and my friends and family are very nice people, the book has some pretty big weaknesses I need help with. It’s definitely not ready for prime time. I’m super excited for the edit though, because I’m normally pretty terrible at taking either advice or criticism, but in this case I’ve resolved myself to the fact that I absolutely need to, so I’m looking forward to taking that step.

Also, my ISBNs arrived today. Which was a wonderful surprise, since I wasn’t expecting them for another week+. Since it’s going to be a while before I’m ready to publish anything I opted not to pay for rush processing. However, since I needed them in order to apply for for an account with Lightning Source I was more than happy to take early delivery. So I also applied for an account with Lightning Source.

So I’ve got my editor, got my ISBNs, waiting on account activation over at Lightning Source.

And quietly storming ideas for the second and third books.