Book Cover Illustrations

In creative endeavors, you often submitting to contests, agents, or publishers. More often than not, your work is rejected. That’s the moment that separates the pros from the amateurs. Many a good writer or artist falls to the wayside after a few rejections. And the truth is quite simple: If you don’t submit what you’re […]

I love the unexpected that is part of freelancing. I never know what the next illustration job might entail. Science fiction, religion, fantasy, mystery… The subject matter varies and keeps things from ever being boring. This weekend, I received the print copy of the Jan/Feb. 2011 issue of the Lamp Lighter magazine (published by Lion […]

I’m sending out this year’s Christmas gift a bit early – to be sure it arrives before folks start leaving work for vacation. The gift is my newly illustrated version of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (in PDF format). As noted in a previous post, a Poe story may seem an odd […]

Things are changing rapidly in the publishing field, especially when it comes to ebooks. Unexpected Ebook Events of the Past 18 Months. A PR release from Arbor Books that undoubtedly is a bit slanted, but nevertheless has some interesting information in it: Six Reasons the Anti-Self-Publishing Movement Is Dead How will the title of your […]

A couple of articles for those wanting to build their own books… A nice how-to article that gives the basics of eBook publishing: Publishing an Ebook. Everything You Need to Know to Design a Book’s Interior in 5 Simple Rules is a concise look at what the essentials for creating an excellent text layout for […]

You see strange things in the murky depths when you go fishing late in the day. A wise fisherman knows not to talk about them, except perhaps to those who fish as he does. This is the “One That Got Away,” that mermaid sighted for just a moment, that lady of the lake who becomes […]

Professor Kathryn Sutherland (who teaches at Oxford University) recently studied over 1,000 original handwritten pages of Jane Austen’s writing and discovered the author was a poor speller, often misused punctuation, and committed a wealth of other “sins” that earn a beginning writer rejection letters from publishers. (For more about Austen’s writing problems, visit NPR.) Of […]

There’s a lot of confusion as to what a small publisher is and what constitutes self publishing. Part of the confusion results because many of these terms are used incorrectly (and I am guilty of this myself sometimes). But part of the problem is that publishing itself is in a flux with technology offering new […]

Making books collectible maximizes the amount earned on each book printed. It becomes possible to earn a lot of money with a very small print run.

I recently saw a writer asking, “So how do you have book signings with ebooks?” Good question. You can only get so many signatures on an iPad, right? But that got me to wondering if an author might produce a different version of their book with “value added” features such as deleted scenes, alternate endings, […]