This photo is basically why I’m slow and reluctant to throw out old digital images. When I first looked at this, I didn’t think much of it, and put it away into a folder of things I wasn’t going to do any post-process on. Years and years later I opened it up again for some reason and went “Holy crap, that’s amazing,” and it’s ended up one of my favourite pictures. It also ended up as the cover for Chaz Brenchley’s wonderful DEAD OF LIGHT, which he reissued a while…
I thought I’d start the new year off right, with a cover reveal for SHAMAN RISES, the final book of the Walker Papers! Would you like to know all the reasons this cover is terrific? Let me tell you all the reasons it’s perfect! First: the colors. My publisher’s always been very good about discussing colors with me, and I very much wanted the final book in the series to have a light, bright look in direct and deliberate contrast to the first book’s cover. So what do I get?…
After last week’s post on genderflipped covers, my friend Flit dug up an article she remembered reading about a a bias study regarding female playwrights. The article is well worth reading, but for the TL;DR folk among us (sorry, I only just learned that TL;DR meant “too long; didn’t read”, so now I have to use it at least once), the take-away is “in an as-controlled study as is possible, it turns out women discriminate against female playwrights more strongly than men do, even though plays written by women make…
So Maureen Johnson, YA author, threw down a gauntlet a couple of days ago regarding the way books are marketed and asked her jillions of Twitter readers to gender-flip some of their favorite book covers. To make a cover that might have been offered up if the book was by a person of the other gender, or was gender neutral (initials instead of full names. She’s written a terrific article about the whole problem of gendered covers here, and it is truly worth a read. Really truly honest to God.…
I’ve been given the all-clear to post the MOUNTAIN ECHOES cover! Holy crap, guys! Penultimate Walker Papers book! (And damn, I wish I’d thought of saying RAVEN CALLS was the antepenultimate book when it came out, ’cause I love that word. :))