Of course not. My wife — aka “Queen of Internet Research” — cautioned me, “Everything I’ve read says you need a great cover that really catches the eye.”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I’d always dreamed of being picked up by a major publishing house that had its own artists.

I mean, I like fantasy art as much as anyone, but I’m good with words, not pictures. I had no idea how to locate a good cover artist.

So I asked a friend of mine who is an artist to do it. He begged off, citing his current, non-artistic workload. Nor did any other personal connections pan out.

Ahead of me yet again, my wife told me about several options she’d read about on the internet. The most interesting was a contest where artists compete for the prize of being your cover artist. You are presented with several custom options and only pay if you accept one.

An intriguing concept, but I wanted to know more about my prospective artists. So my friend recommended deviantart.com. There, my wife and I posted a job description and waited, though not for long.

The first reply arrived within half an hour. It was a couple of guys who did freelance art as a team. Their samples looked pretty good, so we emailed them about prices and terms, etc.

Strangely, they never responded. Eager to apply for a job, but no follow up. Hmm…

Not to worry. More replies came in steadily, several a day. The majority of the offerings were anime. I love anime, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t suit the tone I wanted.

The range of the applicants’ ability varied across the full length of the spectrum, as did the their nationalities. Some were teenagers accustomed to drawing derivative anime or action comics, while at least one had done professional illustrations for major publishing houses. We queried him, just to see — he wanted ,000 per cover, and I needed two! Yikes.

Besides the price (which was certainly reason enough), his samples — though excellently executed — looked like most of the cover artwork I’d seen in the past decade. I wanted something different, something that stood out.

We eventually narrowed our choices down to three. Interestingly, not one hailed from the United States.

One was a Scandinavian man whose name I unfortunately cannot recall. His art was strong with an almost photographic realism. Norse gods and heroes were his favorite subjects. Though mythology permeates my novels, it derives more from an ancient Greek inspiration. Also, since my two primary antagonists were female, I wanted a feminine touch for both covers.

Which left two very different ladies from two distant countries. According to her bio, “DeftlyHeartless” is a Filipina digital artist that works for a videogame company. Her vivid style and graceful rendering of the feminine form reminds me of the newer Final Fantasy series.

Paint, by DeftlyHeartless

One of her samples, “Paint” shows an exotic woman (possibly the artist herself) painting with magical effects on a canvas. After much consideration, I decided her style looked too contemporary for my theme.

I ended up commissioning a Polish erotic artist that goes by “Saarl.” Though I didn’t require anything as risqué as the majority of her art, she excels at rendering the female figure in a realistic manner — unlike most of my prospective artists, who tended to over-idealize women like in the comics, with exaggerated busts and hips.

Saarl’s women looked… well, like women. I could see classical influences in her work, especially in my favorite, a piece called “Not as Innocent,” which looked both sinister and timeless. And timeless was what I was shooting for.

Not as Innocent, by Saarl

Next up: collaborating with my chosen artist…

Black Gate

Last week I made an appearance at the Australian Women Writers blog, talking about Australian romance (you’ll have to scroll down the page a little to get to my guest-post). More expert opinions on the topic are to be found in

Sold by the Millions: Australia’s Bestsellers
Editor: Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Date Of Publication: March 2012

The book contains a chapter by Hsu-Ming Teo on “Britishness and Australian Popular Fiction: From the Mid-nineteenth to the Mid-twentieth Centuries”:

She concludes that while children’s and men’s popular fiction “successfully indigenised or even Americanised after the Second World War, the same was not necessarily true of the bulk women’s romance novels, even at century’s end.” The reason for this, according to Teo, were the “conditions of national and international Anglophone publishing in the twentieth century” that to a large extent “shaped Australian popular fiction in such a way that women’s romance novels remained tied to the apron strings of empire, attentive to the demands of British editors and an overseas market even as a distinctive postcolonial ‘Australianness’ was
asserted.” (xi)

and a chapter by Juliet Flesch, “The Wide Brown Land and the Big Smoke: The Setting of Australian Popular Romance”:

Juliet Flesch in her chapter, focusing on the mass appeal of Australian popular romances, examines how far the Australia’s romance novelist’s “portrayal of the natural or built environment” and Australian society “reflects Australian reality”? She concludes that “the impressions overseas readers will gain from some Australian romance novels at least is reasonably accurate,” as “the society described in modern Australian romances reflects the way Australians like to see themselves––egalitarian, optimistic, resilient, welcoming, etc.” (xii)

I haven’t read the book (it’s not out till March) but more details and a link to an excerpt (which includes the foreword) can be found here.

Teach Me Tonight

EPIC FAIL Funny Videos and Epic Fail Funny Pictures

Book Notes: (authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates to their book)

Ayad Akhtar for his novel American Dervish
Elizabeth Hand for her novel Available Dark
Frank Bill for his short story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana
Mike Doughty for his memoir The Book of Drugs
Tupelo Hassman for her novel Girlchild
Will Hermes for his book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever

Contests:

Win two graphic novels and a 0 Threadless Gift Certificate

Weekly New Book Recommendations:

Atomic Books Comics Preview (recommended new comics and graphic novels)
Largehearted Word (recommended new books)

New Music Recommendations:

Try It Before You Buy It (full album streams and mp3s from this week’s music releases)
The Week’s Interesting Music Releases

New DVD recommendations:

The Week’s Interesting DVD Releases

And of course, the daily music and news posts:

Daily Downloads (10 free and legal mp3 downloads every day, plus links to free live recordings online)
Shorties (news & links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

also at Largehearted Boy:

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks
Antiheroines
Atomic Books Comics Preview
Book Notes
Book Reviews
Contests / Giveaways
Daily Downloads
Largehearted Word
Lists
music & DVD release lists
musician/author Interviews
Note Books
Soundtracked
Try It Before You Buy It
Why Obama

Largehearted Boy

These calls for papers aren’t specifically about romance: they’re about “cultural recycling,” whiteness, “the materiality of literary texts” and Asperger’s Syndrome. One could, though, discuss romances in conjunction with all of these issues.

Since fairy tales and references to Shakespeare, occur fairly frequently in romance, and since in For Love and Money I took a quick look at some romances which were reworkings of the Pygmalion myth, and others which reworked the tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, it seemed to me that romance fiction is full of “allusions and echoes.”

Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation

An international colloquium at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

June 16-17, 2012

Deadline for paper/panel submissions is March 30, 2012.

The many ways in which stories are recirculated is astounding – from relatively straightforward retellings of fairy tales and classical myths, to feminist, queer, postcolonial or ecocritical subversions of central themes, to fan fiction’s adaptations of beloved characters and story worlds.

The international colloquium “Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation” is an opportunity to explore the various ways in which texts communicate over borders of space, time, genre and medium. What themes, motifs, backgrounds and details capture the imagination of authors, readers and viewers? How are they recycled and recirculated from one period, or one audience, to another? How and why do they gain currency again and again? Contributors are invited to cast their net widely and consider not only contemporary works, such as The Canongate Myth Series (2005-2011) and Cinderfella (1960, 2013) but also older texts, such as Chaucer’s The Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 

More information here.

Apparently “Interracial and interethnic marriages are at an all-time high in the US” (BBC) but I’ve not seen a lot of work on race in romances (other than The Sheik and romances specifically marketed as being about characters of a particular racial group) since Stephanie Burley’s “Shadows & Silhouettes: The Racial Politics of Category Romance” was published in 2000 (in Paradoxa 5.13-14). Abstracts for the following conference are due by today, but maybe it’ll still be of interest:

2nd Global Conference
Images of Whiteness

Saturday 7th July 2012 – Monday 9th July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Since the publication of Richard Dyer’s seminal study ‘White’ in 1997, academics have increasingly turned critical attention to the subject of racial whiteness. Publications include historical accounts detailing the emergence of whiteness as a racial category, cultural studies exploring the representation and construction of white identities in popular culture, film and television scholars examining narratives about white people, reflecting white themes, white obsessions, and white anxieties. Consistent with the shift in critical studies from minority identity formations to consider ‘central’ identities – masculinity, heterosexuality – the study of whiteness is increasingly understood as central to understanding the operation of ‘race’ as a form of social categorisation. Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives are sought from those engaged in any field relevant to the study of whiteness including media and film studies, performance and creative writing, cultural theory, sociology, psychology and medical approaches including cosmetic surgery, and other cognate areas

More information here.

Has publication in the mass-market format affected perceptions of romance novels?

Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material Culture

Essays are invited for a special issue of Belphégor that seeks to explore the relationship between distinctions of taste and textual production by examining how the materiality of literary texts influences and perhaps even determines their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, printing and binding became cheaper, faster, and more easily accessible than ever before, which resulted in an explosion of print material. As printing costs decreased and print runs increased, the price of books became cheaper and publishers were able to attract more readers, which led to a greater demand for new content. The cultural impact of this shift was twofold. On the one hand, this decrease in printing costs lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in the expansion of popular or trivial literature as well as a wide range of new popular formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, and paperbacks. On the other hand, publishers also attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusiveness through printing and binding techniques in order to preserve the highbrow status of literature as a marker of class distinctions. This led to the rise of competing formats that attempted to challenge the perceived lowbrow status of popular literature, such as deluxe editions and graphic novels. As the divide between highbrow and lowbrow taste widened, the materiality of the text became the primary site where the cultural status of popular literature was both constructed and contested. The same issues also inform cultural debates concerning digital media, as cultural distinctions are now being reconfigured through new forms of electronic display in the post-print era.

Abstracts must be submitted by 1 March 2012. More details here.

After the success of Jennifer Ashley’s The Madness of Sir Ian Mackenzie and the recent publication of Eloisa James’s The Duke is Mine in which the heroine

is torn between a duke with an Asperger’s-like inability to express emotion, who relies on logic, and her fiancé Rupert, who is all emotion with almost no logic. (interview with the author)

I wondered if there was some material in romance novels which would be relevant to the following volume:

Bright Lines: Culture On the Autism Spectrum

Teach Me Tonight

I was thinking that, along with the thought that the media is going to utterly destroy Rick Santorum. Utterly destroy him. It’s already begun, courtesy of a diatribe in today’s NY Times by Charles Blow, and the recent interview by media attack dog Charlie Rose. Did you see or hear the interview?

As Santorum tried to point out, none too well, there was something fundamentally dishonest about the Charlie Rose line of questioning. Santorum wanted to talk about the economy. Rose’s job wasn’t to talk about the economy! His job was to destroy Rick Santorum. He knew it, Santorum knew it, and we knew it. Whichever side you’re on, you know it.

Why is Santorum a particular target? Because his ideas go beyond the acceptable narrative. If you don’t hew closely enough to the media’s own in-bred beliefs, you’re beyond the pale. A “crackpot.”

HONESTY
The one question asked by nobody is whether what Santorum’s supporter said was true or not. The “aspirin between the legs” quote. Is it true?

Of course it’s true. That there were way fewer out-of-wedlock births fifty years ago, and fewer social problems, is an easily documented fact.

We have to be honest enough to admit that.

MORE HONESTY
Let’s be honest. We love liberal social ideas, myself included. (I don’t say “liberal values,” because that’s an oxymoron.) We love them.

Why do we love them? Because they’re easy. They ask of us nothing. NOTHING. They say, go have fun. Indulge yourself, with no consequences. If there are consequences, the government will pay for them. Pursue every appetite, bar none.

People hate Roman Catholic doctrine because it’s not easy. It’s in fact very difficult. Even the Church’s hardest core advocates, its priests, have trouble living their own doctrine. Catholic philosophy is a difficult model to follow. It believes life was meant to be a challenge, a spiritual journey full of obstacles.

Then again, wisdom comes only from difficulty.

We don’t ask the practical question– no one wants to ask it– of whether Santorum’s social ideas will work. (Once, they more or less did work.) We don’t ask if his ideas are true. The media won’t ask that. Truth is irrelevant to them. “What is truth?” Their philosophical foundation is a convenient and expedient disbelief in truth. All they know is they have a job to do– to get the candidate closest to their own viewpoint into office. To enforce, as they always enforce– not just on Santorum’s issue but other issues– the acceptable narratives.

UPCOMING at this blog: “Lacan and Liberal Bias.” Yes, an idea or two from a recent French philosopher that might have application to something in the real world. I’m surprised myself. Stay tuned.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Steampunk by David Deitrick, and everyone likes Steampunk right?

So a bit over a month ago I started my first every Kickstarter, a retro-fantasy book launch with Jeff Easley that ended earlier this week. It was a very interesting month and as people seem interested in Kickstarter’s and the possibilities that the Kickstarter site provides, I thought I’d continue blogging about it on Saturdays as long as I find out new and applicable facts concerning the program.

That being said, I’ll take you into the process once more and even append some of the numbers I initially reported during my first discourse into this topic.

This post will be about percentages, and how they can affect your project.

When I started my Kickstarter, my pledge numbers [which is to say those who became backers of the project and gave money] were mostly rolling in from feeds on Facebook. This was a cool fact, and showed that viral marketing through your social network does pay off. The percentage was roughly 70% Facebook and 30% Kickstarter internal marketing, and I was happy with that. As the month continued, however, the numbers started to realign with less and less Facebook traffic and more and more Kickstarter original pledging taking place.

Why is this, you might ask? Well, it’s an interesting thing. You see, Kickstarter has a tag it calls ‘Discover’ on its Home Page, and from that tag you can find various categories that might interest you as a possible backer. There are a bevy of them including Art, Music, Photography, Publishing, etc. One of these categories is ‘Recently Launched’ which is a nice way for Kickstarter to promote new projects and give them a bit of a boost when they start out. Still, as a Kickstarter page is laid out, a viewer can see only three projects across the top of their screen per category and perhaps another three below those before the ‘cut’. These first three projects featured at the top of the page are called ‘Staff Picks’ which are prime real estate for any project looking to draw the eye of a backer.

It’s kind of like Google in that if you aren’t on the first page of a Google search, odds are you aren’t getting found, and if you’re not in the top 3 of the page, you’re probably not even going to get clicked on. Same applies here, although a page view does allow for at least three projects to be viewed below the ‘Staff Picks’ in a ‘Popular this Week’ category which may also draw a perspective backers eye.

In every Kickstarter you begin with nothing more than an empty canvas…

Now the Easley project did get on ‘Popular this Week’ several times, but it can change daily, even hourly, and there are two horizontal columns for ‘Popular this Week’ with the second column appearing beneath the cut on most standard monitors so that’s not quite as nice for marketing.

Also, Kickstarter’s Home Page features a ‘Project of the Day’ in it prime upper left screen position as well as a randomly chosen featured project from any of the Kickstarter categories in the upper right. If you can get on one of these, you should benefit greatly, although my Easley project never did, nor did I manage the favor of a Kickstarter employee as a ‘Staff Pick’ during the entirety of my month.

How you make it onto one of the Boardwalk and Park Place properties of the Kickstarter Home Page I’ve yet to find out, but if I do I’ll be sure to share.

Now about 2 weeks after the project’s launch there was a marked decline in pledging and we’d looked to hit our ceiling, but one Tuesday afternoon I checked my email and found no new backers, went to pick up my son from school, and came back home to find seven new backers. This continued at a nice pace throughout the next two days and as I investigated the reason I found out what non-Facebook product placement is capable of.

You see, during my project’s run on Kickstarter, not one, but two Kickstarter projects were breaking records in fan pledging across the board. The first was Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick reprint drive. Now if you don’t know what Order of the Stick is, it’s a great independent comic that features stick figure characters in a D&D-like setting doing comical and geeky things. Great right? Well, it must be greater than I figured because at the time I’m writing this the Order of the Stick Kickstarter has raised 9,327! Yep, you read those figures correctly. Nearly a million dollars in pledges to reprint Burlew’s comic.

Burlew, for his part, has run a stupendously well marketed Kickstarter, and has given fans a whole bunch of incentives and swag along the way, but still, those numbers are incredible when you consider what my Kickstarter finished at [less than .0097%]. However, as much as I’d like to be jealous with Rich for his success, he was kind enough to mention twenty Kickstarter projects that he’d supported in one of his project updates and my Easley project was one of them. Presto! 00 more in pledges roll in from that single mention even if it didn’t link directly to me.

Just insane! That, for all you scoring at home, is the power of mass marketing on a project like this. Rich’s influence completely flipped my Kickstarter, and by the closing I’d gone from 70% Facebook backing to 70% Kickstarter backing.

For every little bit of backing you start to build your project from the ground up…

Now if you think Rich’s success is something, two weeks into my Kickstarter a little video game company out of San Fransisco called Double Fine and 2 Player Productions launches a Kickstarter for a new adventure game that the gaming industry wouldn’t buy because ‘adventure games are dead’. Well, apparently not because in less than 20 hours Double Fine had reached ,000,000 and at the time of this posting was sitting on ,940,030 with 24 days left on their project…

Yep, I’m feeling kind of small. How did they do it? I have no freaking idea other than they had an established fan base and somehow went viral.

I mean, I thought I had an established fan base right here on Black Gate. I was the #1 visited blogger in January and had over six thousand page views of my articles which is positively huge for a BG blogger. How did that translate into Kickstarter pledging? 3… Yes, you read that correctly. I had over 6000 readers in January and 3 of them pledged to my Easley Kickstarter. That is a staggeringly woeful .0005% capture rate.

In a day and age where it costs .65 for a cup of gourmet coffee that takes 1 minute for an entire transaction, I drew 3 backers when my minimum pledge was .00. Flavored water laced with caffeine for .65 or an a epub novel covered and illustrated by one of the Top 10 fantasy artists of the past thirty years and professionally designed and edited right here by Black Gate Books staffers that has taken countless hours of creative process and work to create. Amazing…

To the 3 people that supported me, I salute you. At least a chosen few still believe that the power of the small press is worth more than a cup of overpriced Joe.

What does this mean to your personal Kickstarter? Here are my top 4 for this post.

Once you get the support, you then get to put it all together…

Number One: Know your fan base! If you don’t have one, then don’t do a Kickstarter!

Number Two: Facebook is great, but it’s quickly becoming Kickstarter saturated, so don’t depend on it.

Number Three: You need to have a connection that will take you viral. I personally haven’t figured that one out, but I’m working on it.

Number Four: Video production value really, really helps. My video production value stinks, but I’ve seen much worse. Double Fine had a professional documentary crew with a price tag of 0,000 do their Kickstarter video, but they got 2 million out of the deal, so that gamble paid off, but it’s still a gamble.

With all of the above in mind, I started my second Kickstarter, this one with iconic Steampunk artist David Deitrick. If you’ve read this far you might as well click the link here and check it out. You can also see some of his comic images for the Kickstarter in this article. Comics certainly worked for Rich Burlew, right, so why not us?

Anyway, to all you folks out there who read my words each week, or sometimes twice a week, I’m giving you another chance to redeem my faith in my fan base. At a minimum its .00, and if you don’t have an ereader then you still get a PDF and I know you have a computer. Show the guys and gals here on Black Gate that we do have a great readership and that we are really connecting with people.

Until next time, good tidings and great reading!

Black Gate

“Evil is hidden much deeper in man than is supposed by the socialist machine men and cannot be avoided whatever the organisation of society.”

I’ve been trying to read current philosophy– trying also to understand it, though much of it is gasbag doubletalk. The problem with philosophers is that their ideas float in bubbles without context or consequences.

Unlike Nietzsche, Dostoevsky ”tested” ideas in his novels. It’s remarkable how prophetic his books were. They foretold the crimes and monsters of the 20th century. Nietzsche, by contrast, wasn’t able to envision the result of “killing” God– the nihilistic wars that he in part unintentionally caused.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

EPIC FAIL Funny Videos and Epic Fail Funny Pictures

EPIC FAIL Funny Videos and Epic Fail Funny Pictures