Today is your last day to try several of my more popular
titles in the SJS DIRECT Catalog for free on Smashwords. After today, all the
promotional titles go back to retail price.
The books that are a part of the Summer Campaign on
Smashwords are:
In addition to those titles
It’s also your last day to pick up Isis: Samurai Goddess and E’steem: LittleGirl Lost for free on Smashwords! So if you want to pick up these titles, pick
them up NOW!
When you see an image on a book cover it’s just not a pretty
picture. It tells a story. It’s that story in that image that gets people’s
attention. And that story can mean the difference between a book getting a sale
or getting ignored by potential readers.
In order to create the art on a cover, a publisher has to
develop a concept that tells the entire story of the novel in a single image.
It can be a picture based on something that happens in the story, or it can be
an idea of something related to the story. The image has to give a reader a
sense of what’s going on and make them care enough to pick up the book.
When I create a cover, I usually take a scene from a part of
the story and turn that into an image. It’s that one image that I believe will
define the story and get the attention for readers.
Sometimes I’ll take a scene from the beginning of the story.
Other times I’ll take a scene from the middle of the book. And sometimes I’ll
use a picture related to something in the books theme.
When I was storyboarding Bill Walko’s cover for Isis: Brideof Dracula I took an image from the middle of the story. And the image shows a
hypnotized Isis getting ready to attack John Haynes while Dracula mists above
watching the action. I thought that image would tell the story of the book and
grab the reader with one single image.
Usually when I’m designing a concept for a cover story, I
have to write and draw out what the scene is so the artist knows what story to
tell in a picture. From experience I’ve found the more information the artist
has, the more details they can add to the picture. But I don’t write too many
details, I want the artist to put some of their ideas in the story!
In storyboarding a cover, a writer has to be clear about
what they want in an image. They have to clearly describe the mood and the tone
they want to set, and how they want the image to look.
For The Legendary Mad Matilda, I believed that the scene
where Matilda takes her mugshot defined the story. And I wanted to get a little
more artsy with the image. So I drew up a concept piece:
And a model sheet of Mad Matilda. While the cover concept is
a ¾ figure, the model sheet is to give an artist a sense of Mattie’s character,
her outfit and how the elements of it work. The notes are to give an artist an
understanding of Mattie’s size, proportions, what her outfit should look like,
how the clothes drape and a sense of the story behind the character.
The Concept piece art give the artist a set of how I want
the art to look on the cover. With Legendary Mad Matilda being a novel about a African-American
Goth, I wanted to exaggerate some of the mugshot with elements related to the
subculture. So instead of height lines I gave it some stripes reminiscent of
Tim Burton and Beetlejuice to make the visual pop. The lines draw us to the
figure and the center of the piece which is the Black Widow pendant on her
chest, which represents who Matilda is as a Goth.
For the tone, I wanted Mattie to have an uneasy look on her
face and some tense body language. That’s supposed to represent her uneasiness
about being arrested and her future coming out of college. She’s nervously
holding the board that shows the her arrest in her black manicured hands that
features the title of the book.
In that image I tell a story that I hope has the reader
asking a bunch of questions. Who is Mad Matilda? What makes her a Legend? And
what happened to her to wind up in this situation? Was it a wild party? Or was
it something else? It’s those questions that will have the reader wanting to
pick up the book and check out a few chapters of the story to get the answers.
Oftentimes the final image of a cover will be open to an
artist’s interpretation. They may change some elements of a design to fit their
style. However, the goal of a great piece of cover art is to remain accurate to
the models provided by the publisher and tell the story the publisher wanted
for the cover. There’s a lot of work that goes into a cover, and that story
that single image tells has to be as well written as the words in a book.
I’d love to see how an artist would tell the story I wrote
for the cover for The Legendary Mad Matilda in pictures, and I need your help
to pay an artist to design it. So if you could donate to my Patreon or my PayPal,
I’d greatly appreciate it!
I spent another Saturday night drawing. And I finally did a
model sheet for Mad Matilda as she appeared in the first twenty or so chapters
of my upcoming novel, The Legendary Mad Matilda.
This full body sheet is based on the cover concept for The Legendary
Mad Matilda, and shows the entire outfit she wore for VampJam 95. As the Queen
of the Industrial Goth Raves Mad Matilda has a more aggressive look than the
elegant one she wore as The Black Widow in Spellbound or the more businesslike
one she wore in Spinsterella.
Industrial Goth looks usually feature DIY modded T-shirts,
short skirts, spiked collars and cuffs and platform boots, and wild out there
hairstyles. And to make Mad Matilda’s stand out, I went with different shading
techniques so she wouldn’t be wearing a solid block of black. Goths often use
textures and shades of black to break up the black, and I used that technique
to make the blacks on Mattie’s outfit stand out in a crowd.
I drew inspiration for Mad Matilda’s Industrial Rave look
from many of the outfits I saw Goth YouTubers like Amy Nekrotique, It’s Black
Friday and Ligiea Resurrected wearing in their videos. The pigtails were
inspired by the one YouTuber Rose Nocturnaila used to wear in several of her
videos. And with the story set during the time where Mattie was in her Goth
prime I had to incorporate V-bangs as part of her look. Because V-bangs are
AWESOME.
The platforms in this design are a lot more elaborate than
in previous sketches. Taking a look at several New Rock boots online, I decided
to make Mattie’s footwear a bit more elaborate. New Rock Goth boots often use
texture and shades to stand out, and I tried to present that in her boots. They
kind of have a Jack Kirby vibe to em’ but that fits right in with the Industrial
look Mad Matilda wears at her raves. These are based on the tall New Rock
platforms with the springs in them; I think they’d be the kind of crazy
footwear an Industrial Rave Queen would wear when she hosted her shows.
Work on The Legendary Mad Matilda is FINISHED. The
manuscript is edited, pages are laid out and the paperback and eBook are
uploaded to CreateSpace, Kindle, and a Smashwords edition has been formatted.
All I need to release this book is money to pay for the cover. So if you can
donate anything to my Paypal or my Patreon, I can get this book out by the end
of the year!
A week ago Bakari Henderson was murdered outside of a bar in
Greece by a mob of Serbian men after taking a selfie with a White waitress.
While his death was a tragedy it could have been prevented if this young brotha
understood the unwritten social rules regarding being a Black man in the world.
Barkari Henderson like many young Black males who grew up
over the last 20 years grew up believing the lies about a “post-racial” America
and a world that’s a “Rainbow”. And because they have some White friends they
think that they’re free to do whatever they please wherever they please just
like White people.
That’s a lie that cost Bakari Henderson his life. And it can
cost many other young brothers their lives if they don’t understand it too.
When it comes to Black men, the world works differently for
us than it does for White men, White women, and even Black women. And a Black
man has to know how to set a course for himself to avoid the dangers around
him.
Because Bakari Henderson grew up believing that he lived in
the world of the “Rainbow” with his White friends he never taught that a Black
man has a target on his back the minute he steps foot outside of his house. And
that target grows larger when he travels abroad to places like Greece.
When a Black man goes out of his house he is on his own behind
enemy lines. And when he goes into someone else’s country he is in the center
of enemy territory. So a Smart Black man knows to watch his back and watch
himself in his social interactions with both White and nonblack people. Because
the wrong look, or the wrong move in a place like a store can lead to a Black
man getting locked up or it can put him six feet under.
A Black man taking a selfie with a White waitress may be
something innocent in some of the more liberal parts of America. But in some of
the southern, midwest and western parts of America and abroad that kind of
action can cost a Black man his life. Seeing him take that selfie with that White
waitress was all the reason those Serbian racists needed to go on the warpath.
These Beta White Knights saw a nigger in their bar with their woman in their
country acting like a White man. And they sought to send a message to all the
other niggers around the world regarding their women.
What happened to Bakari Henderson was no different than what
Carolyn Bryant’s husband and brother and law when they planned to murder Emmit
Till back in the 1950s. Those Serbs literally lynched him all for taking a
picture with a White woman.
And just like 14-year-old Emmitt Till didn’t understand the
unwritten social rules regarding racism in the Jim Crow South in the 1950s, 22-year
old Bakari Henderson didn’t understand them about traveling abroad in European
countries in 2017.
The times may have changed. But the racism is still the
same. Bakari Henderson didn’t get the survival skills a Black man needs from
his parents. And that cost him his life.
A Black man has to understand at an early age he can’t do
the same things that White men, Hispanic Men, Asian Men, White Women Black
women or Nonblack women can do in the world. They’ll always have social
privileges and freedoms he’ll never have. Thanks to White Supremacy, he’ll
always be perceived as an enemy and a threat. So he has to do things to
minimize the danger to himself. That’s why it’s important for a Black boy to
learn all the unwritten social rules regarding Black men in a White Supremacist
world from an early age. Because the earlier he learns those rules, the earlier
he knows how to avoid life-threatening situations like the ones Bakari
Henderson and Emmitt Till wound up in.
