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COVER REVEAL — RED FOX

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Here’s the truth about book cov­ers — they are really, REALLY impor­tant. A great cover (such as Lying Season’s) will entice the reader to pick it up (maybe explains why Lying Season’s sales last week were through the roof…well, for the EIT series any­way), while a bad or unin­ter­est­ing cover may cause peo­ple to hes­i­tate or even refuse to read a book.

I was eter­nally unsat­is­fied with the cover of Red Fox. Though the artist at the time did com­ply with what I asked for, I thought the end result was mud­dled and NOT AT ALL rep­re­sen­ta­tive of this fun and fast-paced story. It is well-drawn, detailed, moody and makes for nice art but just isn’t book cover mate­r­ial. But when you’ve com­mis­sioned a piece and you have a pub­li­ca­tion date to hit, you some­times have no choice but to make do.

I also noticed that a lot of read­ers were skip­ping RED FOX which I thought was a real shame since an infor­mal poll has placed Red Fox as the best written/most enjoyed Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror novel (though that may change with Lying Sea­son now out). I could only attribute the gloss­ing over of this awe­some book because of the dull and unin­ter­est­ing cover. It just didn’t cap­ture the magic or the eye.

And so, me and my (new) artist have been hard at work cre­at­ing a new cover that’s a lit­tle more eye-pleasing.

Start­ing Tues­day, this cover will be re-issued on all E-versions of the book on Smash­words, Kin­dle, Nook, etc (which is also get­ting some extra inter­nal re-formatting for glitchy issues) and hope­fully by the end of week, the paper­back re-issues will be done as well. I’ll announce when they are avail­able. I’ll be hav­ing a give­away too, so be sure to check back then!

Oh right…the new cover…ta-da!

Lying Season (EIT #4) teaser

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With all the hub-bub over the release of The Ben­son (my free EIT novella, which you can down­load here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/112314 — please let me know if you like it) I sorta for­got about Lying Sea­son.

Well, no not really. It’s not pub­li­ca­tion day yet. There is still some tweak­ing and for­mat­ting to be done.

But because it’s almost my birth­day, and I have a few more days left in my twen­ties to be a tease about things, I decided to put up the first chap­ter of Lying Sea­son. If it con­fuses you, that’s OK…once you read the rest of the book it will make some sense. Sorta ;)

Read the first chap­ter of Lying Sea­son (EIT #4) HERE.

I may release the sec­ond chap­ter tomorrow…depends how naughty I feel.

OH and don’t for­get, if you like what you read, you can still enter to win paper­back copies of Lying Sea­son through Good Reads HERE:

Goodreads Book Give­away

Lying Season by Karina Halle

Lying Sea­son

by Karina Halle

Give­away ends Decem­ber 13, 2011.

See the give­away details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Why I chose self-publishing (Part Two)

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So, now we know how I came to decide on going the self-publishing route, now we get down to why I chose it.

One of my mot­tos is “If you need some­thing done right, you have to do it your­self” (I fear that you’re going to find that phrase pep­pered across many a blog post here), so obvi­ously the whole idea of self-publishing appealed to me right away. Once I got past the fact that self-publishing was no longer a “last resort” but “first choice”, I embraced the medium and all its pit­falls and draw­backs with open arms.

What appealed to me about self-publishing? Con­trol. Con­trol over every­thing except the public’s minds (and that may still hap­pen if I can get a hold of some WW2 brain­wash­ing tac­tics and Kool-aid). I get to choose the book cover (and cre­ate it/hire some­one to cre­ate it), I get to con­trol the mar­ket­ing strat­egy (book trailer FTW), I get to con­trol the series as a whole. I get total con­trol over my char­ac­ters and they can say what­ever the fuck (excuse my French, Dex is a bad influ­ence) they want to say and do what­ever they have to do. I get to own the rights to every­thing. I get to cre­ate my bio. I get to hire a pho­tog­ra­pher. I get to plan my own events. I get to inter­act directly with “fans” instead of a mouth­piece (I say fans loosely because I have no idea if I will have any fans or not). I get to write about what I want to write, regard­less of what is ‘in” or not. I can choose to end the series at seven or eight books or I can bring in a follow-up tril­ogy years down the road if I find that I’m miss­ing my char­ac­ters too much. I can write sex scenes with­out a pub­lish­ing com­pany breath­ing down my neck. I get to make my own logos and mer­chan­dise and art­work. In short, I get to cre­ate an empire.

What’s not as appeal­ing? Well, any of the above. I mean, that’s a shit ton of work right there. But you know, I wouldn’t have it any other way (although look for a rebut­tal post in about a year).

In other news, I’m off the Island now (but “WE HAVE TO GO BACK, KATE!”) and I’m adjust­ing to city life. I say adjust­ing loosely since I’ve lived in the city for 29 years. Luck­ily, this does mean I’m still writ­ing. As sooth­ing and beau­ti­ful as loung­ing on a boat and going for long walks in the woods with curi­ous deer bound­ing around you is, it’s not REALLY con­ducive to my writ­ing. I mean, the entire fourth novel is set in the urban, gritty sprawl of Seat­tle. At the end of Novem­ber. Does the pic­ture on the left look any­thing like down­town Seat­tle in Novem­ber? No. Any­hoo, the sounds of the bin­ners and drag-queen drug addicts in the alley behind my apart­ment are adding that lit­tle bit of atmos­phere to my craft. And look:

Book #4 - Lying Season
 

24102words
110,000words

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Ghetto progress bar says every­thing is com­ing along just fine.