Nell's Dragon

My book is out. Finally. I wrote Nell's Dragon back in 2007, and have been trying to get it published for a long time. The old system of publishing is really hard to break into I found. The publishers rarely read your manuscript if you don't have an agent, and the agents prefer to take on authors who are already published. Needless to say it must work for a lot of people, but I got a bit disheartened by the amount of doors slammed in my face.

So I was delighted to learn that Amazon has opened up their Kindle market for authors who want to publish their own work. I think this might be the new way to go. Quite a few people have e-readers already and the number is growing rapidly. An author can publish directly to their audience and charge so much less for it while still making a living.

So here it is. My first fiction book.

It is a fantasy about a troubled boy who finds new friends and different worlds. There are dragons and lots of new sights to see. I really enjoyed writing it and I hope very much that people will like it.

Here is the link for the book on UK Amazon. For the American version use the link in the sidebar.

Nell's Dragon - the cover work

So, if any of you ready my other blog you will know that I have worked a while to finish the cover for my new book Nell's Dragon.
I have been playing with thumbnails and lots of sketched to try and find the best moment of the book to put on the cover. I decided on the dual between a drake and a dragon and I wanted to add my main character in there as well, because this is not an epic fantasy as such, more a very personal journey of a boy trying to find out where he belongs in the world.

It took me quite a while in between work and other projects to put this cover together and it was redesigned plenty of times. In many ways I think working with a brief from a customer might be easier than working for yourself. I know the whole book by heart of course and there was so many different subjects to choose from and I kept getting new ideas.

This is the finished picture.

Now, I am quite happy with the render and the finished picture, but something was nagging me. One thing was the boys face although I couldn't yet put my finger on it. The other was, that this cover needs to function on a website and on small e-readers, both in colour and in Black and White. I was afraid it might just be too busy and not read very well in a small thumbnail size.
So I explored another idea where I kept the background totally simple and just had two silhouettes doing all the work. I quickly sketched the characters and thanks to Inkscape got them smoothly converted to vector shapes so that I could play around with the sizes.
This is what I ended up with:

While this cover doesn't tell much about the story, it does hint at it, and it reads much better in small. I was still loathe to throw away the other, so I asked for my sister's opinion.

She was in no doubt that I should go with the silhouette one, in fact she pinponted exactly what was wrong with the first. The boy has such a look of "tormented saint" about him, that it is hard to empathise with him. She is soo right!

So the silhouettes won. That cover took me two hours to make where the other took me best part of three days.