Cover Reveal: Dragons of Dunmoray

 Today I am delighted to share with you - the cover of Dragons of Dunmoray!

And I am now officially open to ARC (Advanced Review Copy) signups - so if you are interested in joining my review team please signup below.

Dragons of Dunmoray ARC signup form

The Dragons are Coming

 

I have a new novel in the pipeline, a dark fantasy set in Scotland. I'll be telling you more in the coming weeks, so watch out for my cover reveal! Not long to go now!

The Arid Lands Cover reveal

Today I am delighted to share with you all, the cover for my next novel The Arid Lands, a dystopian Sci Fi thriller set in the Mediterranean 600 years from now.

Marketing Red Rock – a plan for promotion

I don’t intend doing a great deal of marketing and promotion for Red Rock. This is a re-release and in my mind it’s already had its day. But rather than simply press publish and leave it there to gather dust, I’ve decided to do a few things to give it a boost. It will be interesting to see which, if any of these, result in an uptick in sales.

1. Author social media accounts, twitter, Instagram, other? In the end I decided to set up an author Instagram account. I then generated a set of promotional graphics using Midjourney and Canva which I will publish to this account at regular intervals.

2. Run a giveaway. (Unfortunately Goodreads only allows this for US authors so I will run it from my author IG account and try to boost on Twitter) The giveaway will be for an e-copy – that way I can run it internationally. It might be good though to have some additional swag or a prize to make it more interesting. The easiest thing for me to offer is a chapter critique.

3. Countdown deals on Kindle Unlimited. I could offer it free or at 99p  to coincide with a special event such Earth day.

4. Review copies. Offer review copies in various ‘groups’ I belong to in the hope that they will enjoy it and give it a boost.

5. Participate in indie author events eg #indieapril on twitter

I will report back on these and what effects they have, which appear to be the most useful, and which don’t appear to make any difference to sales. This will be useful for me when I come to self publish my next book, which won’t be a re-release. The next one will be something new.

Red Rock (new) Cover Reveal

 Today I am delighted to share with you - the new cover for Red Rock!

A few tips for generating book cover and promotional artwork on MidJourney

Using MidJourney to generate artwork in support of my forthcoming self-publishing adventures has been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’m going to share a few tips with you. I hope, if you’re going to give MidJourney a try, that you find them useful.

1.    Discord channel: Set up your own Discord Channel and then invite the bot to it. This will enable you to keep all your images in one place and to easily find earlier prompts if you decide to generate further variations or upscales. The feed in the Midjourney channels moves far too fast!

2.    Aspect ratio: Midjourney defaults to a square image format. But you can change this. The aspect ratio’s I found most useful were 16:9 for a widescreen format, and 1600:1256 which is the ratio I used for book covers. You can use whatever you like but the algorithm responds to some better than others. The command to set aspect ratio is --ar 16:9

3.    Test algorithms: These are fun to play around with. More keep coming on line but the two I’ve tried are --testp and --v 4. Of these v 4 gave the results I liked best, however it does not allow you to set aspect ratio. So keep an eye out for whatever is new. You might find something you like.

4.    Lighting effects: You can influence the mood of you image by adding commands such as dramatic lighting, cinematic lighting, or octane render. Play around and see what works.

5.    Time of day: Moonlight, night-time, sunset, dusk. These all change the colours in your image and can dramatically change the outcome. I particularly like moonlight! Why not also try snowy landscape or stormy skies. And anything else your imagination suggests!

6.    Mood and style: You can make your image fit with a particular mood or genre. I’ve tried post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk and fantasy, all of which were very effective and created some interesting results

This however has only skimmed the surface of what you can do. If you have a hunt online you will find many more useful guides. Here is one I found particularly handy. Midjourney Prompt Database - A.E. Alexander (aealexander.com)

 

Artwork for Red Rock using MidJourney

 The self-publishing journey for red Rock continues.

Since Red Rock has already been professionally edited my first major task is to generate artwork and create a cover. There are two cover formats required. One is a simple cover for the kindle edition and the other is the full wrap around cover for the print edition. I also need to generate supporting artwork for use in promotional activities.

To do this I took out a subscription to MidJourney, the AI art generator that runs on Discord. When you sign up you get 25 free credits after which a month’s subscription costs £12 for 200 credits. I let my subscription run for two months before cancelling it. This has given me plenty of images to work with.

To generate an image, you enter a text prompt. For example, one of the prompts I used to generate images for Red Rock is: “A girl walking through flooded city ruins at sunset.” I used variations on this theme as well as specific instructions such as changing aspect ratio, lighting effects, and which algorithm I wanted to use (there are constantly new test ones coming available. Some work for me and others don’t.)

Now I’ve generated images that I’m happy with I will turn to Canva to add text and turn the image into a book cover. I can also use Canva to generate various promotion graphics as well as videos which I will be using on social media to try to get the word out.

But I will talk in more depth about these in future posts. In the meantime, here are a couple of images to whet your appetite.

Midjourney

I recently discovered the Midjourney bot and have been having much fun playing around with it and using it to try to come up with covers for my books!

If you haven’t already come across it, Midjourney runs on Discord. You give it a text prompt and the bot generates AI artwork based on your prompt. There are a few tricks you can use – setting the aspect ratio or different types of lighting or render to help generate a better and more specific image. And of course lots of self-published authors are using it to generate artwork for use in their book covers.

Self-publishing is something I was always wary of. I’ve read too many poor quality poorly edited self-published books. But as more people are following this route they are putting in more effort to make sure their books are of professional quality, and I can now safely say that I’m finding far more good than bad.

With the rights to Red Rock returned that is one book that will definitely be taking this route, followed, in time by others. And so I came to Midjourney with a great deal of interest.

I’m really pleased with the results I’m getting. So much so that I’ve nearly run out of free credits! So I reckon I’m going to have to take out a subscription so that I can play some more!

Literally Sand!

Who would have thought that I would find myself taking part in an author event at Sand Sculpture Festival, but last weekend that is exactly what happened.

Sandsculpture is a feature of many seaside towns and in Weymouth, Dorset the sand is particularly fine and the sculptures of an exceptionally high standard. There have been sandsculptures on Weymouth beach since the 1920s but four years ago the sculptures were brought together under one roof to form the sand sculpture park that is Sandworld.

This year Sandworld’s sculptures are themed around books and authors, and the sand artists have been working hard to bring your favourite characters to life – from Moby Dick to Alice in Wonderland, Charles Dickens rubbing shoulders with Tolkien – but this stunning Warhorse sculpture has to be my favourite. Who cannot feel moved by the tenderness shown between horse and boy?

 

In order to celebrate the Grand Opening of this fantastic sand sculpture festival, five local authors were invited along. Kit Berry cut the ribbon and declared us open and we took turns giving readings to spellbound audiences.

We were given out own special authors area where we set up our books while the sandworld staff kept us supplied with coffee and burgers. In fact I can speak for us all if I say that we had a really lovely day. But enough words. I’ll let the following pictures speak for me.

The author area

Carol Hunt introduces us to the Portland Mermaid

The five local authors, Myself, Carol Hunt, Kit Berry, Kathy Sharpe and Laura James

A young fan asks Kit Berry to sign her book

Moby Dick - note how the waves form the pages of a book!

Prose Cafe with Moish Sokal

Last nights Prose Café at the Octagon Theatre in Yeovil was a talk by watercolour artist Moish Sokal. Here he is discussing one of his paintings with Liz.

His paintings are quite stunning, but what really interested me was the way his craft had developed. He showed us examples of his early work (which looked excellent to my untrained eye) and then described some of the different things he had tried. But what was so interesting was the way that each of these phases in his painting life went on to contribute to the paintings he is producing today.

In a way this is analogous to the way we writers develop our craft. We may experiment with something new, and then move on, but what we have learned all contributes to our craft.

And of course it never stops. What will Moish be painting in ten years time? What will I be writing?

Anyway, Moish has an exhibition of his art opening on the First of June so if you are in the Somerset area it will be well worth a visit. There are details on Miosh’s website here. I will certainly be going along!

Hanging My Bithell

Today I finally got round to hanging ‘Last Light over Charmouth’, the oil on canvas by artist Stephen Bithell, that I bought during Dorset Arts Weeks.

It’s a beautiful seascape, capturing that calm of the evening that reminds me so much of the days before we had children, when we used to go diving, straight after work. As the light faded and the sea assumed the calm of a summer’s evening, still buzzing from the dive and clutching a bag of scallops or a couple of crabs, we would turn Fast Reactor back towards the Cove where she had her mooring, and the cliffs of Bats Head or Warbarrow Tout would be lit with that same quality of light that Steve captures so magnificently in his paintings.