Tag: thriller

Book cover uncovered

Bar a complete change in artistic direction or a total mental breakdown, I’ll be revealing The Quisling Orchid to the world this month.  I asked the ridiculously talented Janet Robinson of ScribbleLeaf to design the cover for me, and unsurprisingly she’s done another bang-up job.

Saying that The Quisling Orchid is ‘multi-faceted’ doesn’t really do the justice. It’s been quite an undertaking, involving a number of very talented editors to make sure that it was the best it could be. It was a lot to reflect in a cover, so instead of telling the whole story on the front, I decided to just focus on the relationship between two of the main characters: Silje and Freya.

TQO.png

I was aiming for stark simplicity, so trying to tell more of the story here would have made the design too cluttered. Besides, the story starts and ends with Silje and Freya, so I was okay with just having two figures on the cover.

And before you ask; yes, those are paper orchids.

Okay, enough spoilers. Read the book! 🙂

Alan Moore gives some helpful advice to writers…

In my opinion, both Watchmen and V for Vendetta are outstanding pieces of work, so any advice this chap gives is well worth listening to.

The article from Digital Spy makes a huge deal of his advice to self-publish, but for me, the standout piece of advice was to keep writing: rework until you are completely happy with what you’ve done, and when you get down to it, you’re the only person who will know for sure when it’s right.

But on the topic of the publishing industry, he had this to say:

As far as publishing goes, my first tip is publishing today is a complete mess. I know brilliant authors who cannot get published… Most of the book publishers don’t want to take a chance on publishing fiction when they can publish an autobiography of The Stig or something like that… The best way these days is publish yourself, it’s become easier and easier.

I certainly agree that publishing is easy; the problem is selling what you’ve published.

Watch the video, and if you’re in one of those ‘what the hell’s it all for’ kind of a rut then watch it again.