All About My New Book

Hi! Welcome back to my blog. Today, I want to talk to you about my cover reveal (happening tomorrow if you’re subscribed to my newsletter!), another surprise I’ll be announcing on my social media on Monday, and a little bit about what to expect from my new book.

So, as most of you know, my cover reveal is happening Monday. I’ve been talking about this for the past few weeks, and I’m really quite excited! I hope some of you are, too. As I did with my poetry anthology, The Secrets Behind My Eyes, I designed the cover myself for this book and created it digitally using some free online tools I’ve discovered. A lot of people will tell you that’s a bad first move, especially for self-publishing, because oftentimes, people can tell that the cover was not made professionally, taking away from the appeal of the book itself. To some degree, I agree with that.

If you don’t know how to do cover design well, haven’t done any research into how to use your chosen program, or don’t know what types of covers are popular in your genre, you should probably not try to make your cover yourself. Depending on what you’re looking for, you can find people who make beautiful covers for a relatively modest budget, and it saves you a lot of hard work and man-hours when you could be writing or editing or marketing yourself.

That being said, while I absolutely do not think of myself as any type of expert in cover design, I found, once I started really playing with my software, that graphic design comes relatively naturally to me. That’s one reason I chose to, again, make my own cover. On top of that, I wanted my first few books, especially my anthologies, to have a similar theme and design. Because these first few books are, for me, an experience of really coming into my own as an author and discovering what type of message and style I want to have, I want my covers to reflect that. I didn’t want them to look too perfect or out of line with my voice and contents. So, hopefully, you’re as excited for my cover design as I am!

Along with revealing my cover on Monday, the ebook version will be going up for presale on Amazon! I wish that I could also put my paperback copy out for pre-order, but alas, Amazon does not allow that through their KDP publishing option. However, that also means that my new book will have an official release day, so I’ll be spending my time until then trying to hype the book! I’m hoping, if all goes according to plan, that I can release the audiobook for my poetry anthology, the audiobook for my short story anthology, and the paperback copy of my short story anthology all at the same time! If so, there will be lots of promo headed your way including a few more samples from stories, and some more reading videos. To get everyone excited about my new short story anthology, I’ll also be releasing a book trailer on Tuesday, so be sure to keep your eye out for that.

Now… what should you expect from my new book when you get your copy? Well, I chose to give myself free rein to write whatever I was inspired to write with each prompt I was given. Not every story I wrote is being released in this book either. There were some that just didn’t fit in well with any of them or had a poor base that I chose not to spend my time rewriting or heavily editing.

So, by giving myself permission to write whatever I wanted, there are a variety of genres within my short stories. There’s sci-fi, far more of it than I had originally intended. (If you remember the sci-fi story I wrote for the third Flash Fiction Friday prompt, there are two follow-up pieces to that story.) There’s romance. There’s mystery. There are thriller/horror stories. There’s historical fiction. There’s something, I hope, for everyone. And, with a few exceptions—like the aforementioned sci-fi stories—the fiction in this book is not designed to be consumed in any particular order. You don’t have to read all of it. You can read only what you want and skip whatever doesn’t sound interesting to you. Hopefully, there will be one story that appeals to you out of the 30 or so that I’ve crafted and included in the book.

Before I sign off, I have a few reminders for you. First, if you want early access to my cover release, you need to sign up for my newsletter using the form that’s just at the bottom of this page. All you have to do is give me your email address, and I’ll send you two emails a month. That’s it. Just two. I promise. Also, if you want to be entered into the drawing for a free copy of my new book (ebook or paperback, your choice!), you need to go to one of my social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram) and comment on YESTERDAY’S post (the one that asks you if you want to play a game!). I will be choosing a winner on Monday, September 21, so you have until 11:59 pm tomorrow (your local time) to enter the drawing. Just leave a comment on the post. That’s it! Thank you, as always, for coming here to read my wild ramblings. I’ll see you back here next Saturday. Have a great week!