On Moving Along

What can I say? I'm an impatient person. I want things to come together, especially when my engines are running and I'm excited to get the job done. That's the thing about me, I'm a go getter and a hard charger. But I've been put into a holding pattern by my professionals that are supposed to be helping me wrap all this up. They are my real creative team. I'm not so creative. I'm just a writer, a key-puncher. I do it because I have to. I need to. These people do their thing because they love it, they're creative and their work is an expression of their creativity.

Well, Damon came though. Yes he did. The other day I got an email from him with two proofs for my book cover. I was overjoyed, because I felt mobile again, I felt as if progress was being made. I looked over the two proofs and it was a no brainer for me. The first one was the one that I actually envisioned. I saw it long before it was made, and it looked exactly like the first proof. The second proof was just too busy to use. The faces were all over the place. Next it was time to make any tweaks to the cover that I felt necessary. I looked it over and there were just two major things that stood out. My black character was given a black shirt, but as I shrank the picture down to postage stamp size, which is how my readers will be seeing it on Amazon and other retailer's web pages, his shirt looked like a black hole, just a black void in the center of the book cover. I needed that changed.

Then a friend of mine brought out a point. Yes, I got four people to give me their honest opinions of the cover and the first two were so way off base that I discarded their suggestions. But my third and fourth persons were right on the money. The title on the first one was the best because it obscured the image of the city the least, and that the tower in the center seemed to be aimed at the jugular vein of my main character, the white guy, in the front.

Also, one of my four critics was JP. I wanted her opinion of the cover because of anyone, she knew the most about the story. Secondly, I wanted to enervate her, to light a fire under her, to get back into the swing of things and work on my book and stop relegating it to the bottom of her work pile. I hoped that this made things tangible for her. She was excited to have a chance to put in her input and I was excited to have it.

Damon made the changes immediately and the second go round was better than the first. It was an awesome cover, just like his website says Damonza's Awesome Book Covers. I highly recommend him if you want a good cover done fast and at a reasonable cost.

But Karma has a way of giving you what you ask for...if you bitch hard enough. And I guess I was doing a lot of bitching because my soon-to-be webmaster, Vladimir, at Webmaster Studios got in touch with me about moving forward. I sent him the proofs of my cover and he wrote me back that he's ready to do an incredible job as soon as I sign the contract and send him his money. This sounds good to me. We revised the contract to suit my needs and now I'm ready to move ahead even on that. In two weeks we'll have that put together and the framework for the book will be complete. Then comes putting it all together into a coherent whole so that I'll have a marketing platform to work from.

From that platform, I'll have the basic thrust of my campaign to get my book to the masses. Hopefully, all this work that I have done and am doing is on par with the book itself. I hope the caliber of my writing is the same as the work of all these people bringing their talents and skills to bear on my behalf.

Like I said, they are the creative ones. I'm just a writer.

Gregory Delaurentis