Category Archive

The Lost, 2nd book in the zombie ocean series, comes out this Saturday, and I’ve set up a free promotion to signal boost both it and the first book, The Last. The last time I promoted The Last I shipped 5000+ copies, which led to a big boost in sales with almost 1000 sold at full price- $2.99. That was my best promotion yet, paying for itself, the cost of the cover, and some of this promo too. Here’s the new promo plan: Aug 18 The Last Ereader news today- $25 Kindle nation daily- $30 Bknights- $10 Kindle books and …

In line with new designs for The Lost, I updated the cover of The Last. Someday soon I’ll do a full post describing how this cover went from idea to its current state. Briefly, along with the text changes to the title I described for The Lost, I redid the colorization so his shirt pops more, everything is sharper, and I zoomed the image so he doesn’t look tiny next to Anna in The Lost 🙂 Oh, and I added the biohazard icon at the bottom.     Other news SY goes to a salsa class tonight! I’ll have some street …

So yesterday I blogged the cover of The Lost, as part of making the page for my website, but here it is again with commentary-    I have changed a number of things from the first iteration of The Last. I think this is easily my most pro-looking cover yet.  The last font was flat, blank, white, on a line. It stood out, but like typewritten ink on a page. This one is an interesting font for the title- bobbled up and down unevenly, kerned (some letters pushed closer together) and stretched (original font was more squat), destructed (via a …

So Francisco (my cover artist, found through Deviant Art) has almost finished the cover image for The Lost, sequel to The Last. It’s more zombies plus the little girl, Anna. Here it is-   I love it. She’s vibrant and in the thick of things. It’s dynamic. He’ll do finishing touches, then I expect I’ll transform it to be in line with the first book. That means desaturate the zombies, amp up the contrast, and of course add titles.  I’ll work on that today- plus I’ll set up the preorder on Amazon (for just one week away) and start lining …

Book 2 of my Zombie Ocean series- The Lost- is finished, edited and proofed, and now the cover is almost done too:  This is the rough sketch from Francisco, and I love it. In the middle is Anna, 5 years old and an apocalypse survivor. This book has some good twists, I think. This cover is just the beginning.  The book will be out in a week! Stay tuned for details upcoming. Working on it really made me think about story theory. My writer pal Matt said The Last seems to be primarily a character arc story, with uneven presence …

The Ruins Sonata, my trilogy of science fiction dystopian post-tsunami apocalypse thrillers- Mr. Ruins, King Ruin, and God of Ruin -just got some stellar reviews from a review site called Bartleby’s reviews. They give away a good chunk of the plot, but not in a way that’ll ruin the books I think. Hopefully it’ll just tempt you to check them out :). To help with that decision, Mr. Ruins is free on amazon.com for the foreseeable future. Mr. Ruins review at Bartleby King Ruin review at Bartleby God of Ruin review at Bartleby

My article on Asylum has reached 600 Diggs, and I`m really pleased. The Digg page got a lot of comments, largely it seems about how bad the HDR is. Looking back on those shots, I can see better what people are talking about now. Part of it is a change of monitor- the old one didn`t show the colors so vividly, so they didn`t look so over-saturated. The new one (just using my macbook screen) shows it better. The Asylum article has sent about 10,000 people to this site so far. That`s pretty amazing. It blows the roof off my …

William Gibson stopped by this website about 9 hours ago and retweeted my Sex Industry in Ruins article. That is awesome. On Twitter he goes by GreatDismal. GreatDismal RT : Love shacks: Japanese love hotels in ruins http://bit.ly/8pK10A I`ve read a number of Gibson`s books and always been impressed. Of course I`ve read Neuromancer, also Pattern Recognition and The Difference Engine. Excellent stuff. I suppose he is very interested in all things Japanese, which perhaps help explain what brought him to my site.

Dave Hill is one of the leading lights in HDR composite photography, layering multiple images together to recreate whatever he can imagine, to stunning and impresive effect. The ‘Dave Hill Effect’ is well-known in photography circles, a certain kind of washed-out, high contrast, stark imagery. Check out a few shots here, and go to his site to see the bulk of it. Girl on an Adventure

Lucas Zoltowski is a professional graphic designer who has created some really fantastic images of the apocalypse. Here’s a few, go to his site to see other great work. Apocalypse city