Historical and Contemporary Romance Author

Monthly Archives : November 2011

Sticking It to the Man


So this is an installment in my ongoing (and sporadic) series on the reasons I’ve chosen to self-publish–and the reasons I haven’t. This one falls into the haven’t category. So, there’s a certain “I’ll self-publish and show you mean publishers (aka “The Man”) how wrong you are about me/my writing/my book!” mentality out there. I can understand the appeal of…

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Putting the Cart Before the Horse


After I wrapped up the cover art design for Wrong Side of the Grave, Stephanie Draven mentioned on Twitter that my experiences were making her wonder if packaging shouldn’t come before writing the book. Or, put more bluntly, whether I was foolish to be spending time and money on cover art for books I haven’t written yet and could, in…

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More Cover Tweaking


Stephanie Draven posted a few suggestions in the previous thread for improving the cover art for Wrong Side of the Grave, most of them having to do with font choice/colors. I still kind of like the Papyrus font for the title, but I did a couple of versions using different fonts (for one, I chose Perpetua because a headstone engravers’…

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A Real Do-It-Myself Project


Last week, I decided that I wanted to put out a short story as a prequel to INCARNATE. The heroine of the series, Elodie Capshaw, has a pretty interesting backstory and I thought it would be fun to explore her history a little more fully. I also thought a free short might spur interest in the series when the first…

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It’s Not a “Woman” Thing


I get the joke. No, I really do. It goes like this: There’s this video of a chimp raping a frog. It’s had over 11 million hits on YouTube. So Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler riffed on this viral video when they put out a free book called “Be the Monkey,” subtitled “A Conversation about the New World of Publishing.”…

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