Wow. First of all, it's been eternity since I've posted any announcements on here. That can mainly be attributed to the fact that I haven't been doing anything particularly announcement-worthy. Yes, Fracture and Embers are still coming along behind the scenes. No, I still don't have a clue when they might be finished, because the majority of the "progress" has just been in my head. I honestly truly hadn't wanted to take this long with them, but they honestly truly will be done at some point. Reminder: you can always check me out on Twitter for the WIP snippets I post for daily word games.
Anyway, at some point during the past month or so, I got to looking at my omnibus cover and it suddenly struck me how—frankly—bad it is. Confession: when I first put it together, I really didn't spend that much time on it. I made use of an old piece of artwork that had originally been on a different background and attempted to use GIMP's somewhat shoddy 3D chrome text effect. It's kind of hit-and-miss in regards to how well it works. This is actually one of the better-quality versions I've seen, but when combined with the old artwork, it still ended up looking kind of... cheap.
I had a couple of ideas for a new design and started kind of casually playing with them, but they ended up being suited more for a square canvas instead of a vertical rectangular Kindle cover. I ended up starting completely from scratch, taking random pieces of previously-existing character artwork and applying random Photoshop actions to it to see if anything stuck. I knew I wanted to maintain the 'nothing-is-ever-black-and-white" theme, but the Photoshop actions were giving me a lot more design options (and better quality ones at that).
Ultimately, I ended up taking two different pieces of previous promotional artwork, combining them, tweaking them so the lighting matched a little better, and running them through Photoshop.
And we ended up with...
I'm quite pleased.
To celebrate (and because this project coincides deliciously with Thanksgiving / Black Friday / Cyber Monday), you can grab The Collection and its shiny new cover for just 99¢ from 11/24 through the end of the month. That's three novels, two character interviews, and two sneak peeks, all in one bundle for just a dollar. Look for an official promo announcement on social media in the next couple of days!
