Showing posts with label Lee Killough. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee Killough. Show all posts

Thursday, February 19, 2015

What's Hot at Books We Love

Check out these brand new releases, hot off the Books We Love press:


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TD41XZK
No Absolution by N.M. Bell

Jake Winncott has a troubled past and living in the cesspool of London’s East End during the Victorian era isn’t helping to ease his mind. Bedeviled by his dead father’s evangelistic shade, Jake sets out to do his father's bidding and cleanse the tainted women of Whitechapel in their own heart’s blood. This is Jack the Ripper as he has never been portrayed. The author takes the reader deep into the tormented heart of the man he might have been and explores a fictional past that might explain his savagery. While the text is gritty at times, and roughly follows the historical timeline of the facts, Jake Wincott is purely a figment of the author’s imagination. N. M. Bell gives the infamous mad man a human face.




http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TEHMHJWThe Doppelganger Gambit by Lee Killough
Brill/Maxwell Book 1

It looks like straightforward suicide to Detective Janna Brill. Starship outfitter Andy Kellener locked himself in his office after hours and took a fatal drug dose. But Brill’s exasperating new partner Mama Maxwell thinks it’s murder, and his chief suspect is Kellener’s partner Jorge Hazlett. The trouble is, Hazlett has an airtight alibi. In 2091's cashless society, every purchase is made with a data chip implanted in the individual’s wrist...and Hazlett’s bank records put him in a shopping mall clear across town at the time of his partner’s death. To get their man, Brill and Maxwell have to prove Hazlett faked his shopping spree...and possibly destroy law enforcement’s best tool since DNA for tracking suspects!

“This is a grittily realistic police procedural set in the 21st century. Don’t miss this one.” Analog Magazine

 

“Like many procedurals the novel’s strength rests as much on the personalities of the cops as in the solving of the crime, and Brill and Maxwell make an entertaining pair.” Locus Magazine
 

“Police Procedural SF is rare — that makes Ms. Killough’s fun romp all the more appreciated. The characters, plot, indeed the whole future society are very well developed in this novel.” SF Review 34  





http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TNCZ9CU
Roses Are Red by Kelly Janicello

Jain Ryan moved to New York City to pursue a career on Broadway. What she didn't figure was falling for and under the watchful eye of NYPD Detective Marcus O'Boyle, her brother's best friend. When Jain scores the role as an understudy for the lead in a Broadway revival, one kiss alters their relationship.
 
Marcus O'Boyle had always been a surrogate big brother to Jain Ryan. When evidence suggests Jain might somehow be involved with the acts of a serial killer targeting Broadway actresses, Marcus is caught between duty and desire for his best friends baby sister.
 
Will Marcus discover who is behind the murders before the killer targets Jain? Or will he be too late to save the love of his life when a psychopath inflicts his final revenge.


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TNCZ9CU



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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Fond Obsession by Lee Killough



      Every story happens somewhere. Sometimes we hunt a stage for our characters, and sometimes we design one. Other times a place calls out to be that stage. To paraphrase Tony Bennett, I lost my heart to San Francisco. From the first time my late husband and I puffed our way to the top of a hill and looked out over the stair-stepped buildings to the bay it’s been my all time favorite city. So when, in 1978, I began plotting my supernatural mystery Blood Hunt, San Francisco whispered: Here I am. Use me.
Oh, yeah. Memories cried out to become scenes in a story. The little greasy chopsticks eatery in Chinatown with grey smoke boiling out of the kitchen to coat the all-Chinese signs on the wall, but serving the best fried rice and egg rolls I’ve ever eaten. The exotic dancer who, while writhing in “passion” on a giant pillow, looked look down on a man at the bar surrounding the stage and said in a bored monotone: “Hi, honey. What’s your day been like?” With the villain of the book being a vampire, she belonged somewhere foggy. It didn’t matter that her hunting ground ended up being brightly lit...because where better than Broadway’s garish blocks of clubs for her to pick up vulnerable visiting businessmen. And after my detective tracked her through those same clubs...and came too close for comfort...the little dead-end alleys provided a perfect site for her to trap and try to kill him.
Try, but fail...turning him into a vampire, too. 
Yeah, a vampire cop. But it was a new idea a decade before Nick Knight came along.
The whole idea for the book grew out of a “what if” moment watching one of those B movies in which some poor schmuck is turned into a vampire and starts dragging around at night in a blood-hungry frenzy. I started wondering what it might really be like for someone to become a vampire. Does a vampire have to be evil? Aren’t good and evil choices? Would he have to sleep in a coffin? Would he have to drink human blood? Because my x-ray tech job at a veterinary school and volunteer stints at blood drives had shown me that student vets and even experienced nurses struggling to hit veins, I had to wonder: wouldn’t there be a learning curve for finding one with teeth? I considered how to explain why some vampires like poor Miss Lucy are almost zombies while other Undead, like Dracula, retain full mental faculties. A retro virus suggested itself as a practical solution. Receive a little vampire virus in saliva from a single bite and a healthy immune system disposes of it. Get drained or receive multiple doses and when the body’s defenses crash the virus takes over, but is potent enough only to reanimate the body. A big slug of virus, though, say received by drinking vampire blood, restores higher brain functions, too. Which explains why Dracula made Mina drink some of his blood when he wanted to make her his bride.
Because I love mysteries, and cop protagonists in particular, a police procedural seemed the idea structure for exploring “what if.” So were born Inspector Garreth Mikaelian and the beautiful but deadly Lane Barber.
After being brought across, Mikaelian not only had to carry on the investigation. He had to deal with what he had become, all the while hiding it from everyone else. He had to answer the above questions regarding good and evil and choices. San Francisco gave me a terrific landscape for it. The first despairing hours of self-realization drove Mikaelian to try killing himself by sitting at the foot of the cross on Mt. Davidson at dawn. Only to find that while oppressively miserable for him, daylight was not fatal. Bram Stoker’s Dracula sometimes went out in daylight, so my vampires can too. I discarded a few vampire “rules,” such as not reflecting in mirrors, but made sure to keep the prohibition against entering a dwelling uninvited because it is a huge handicap for a vampire cop. Which Mikaelian unfortunately discovered trying go in the back door of a suspect’s place while his partner went in the front...with tragic consequences. In a semi-comic scene he discovers there is a learning curve for biting accuracy...and his clumsy failure makes him resolve to never prey on another human.
Writing Blood Hunt and its sequel Bloodlinks — where Mikaelian becomes the quarry of a Van Helsing type — presented one problem, though: I live halfway across the country in Kansas, and my day job and budget didn’t allow for a research trip. So in those days before home computers and the Internet became ubiquitous, I turned to memory and the original search engine: books. I read everything in the library on San Francisco. Current travel guides proved especially helpful. They had not only city info but maps and pictures. Being a huge fan of Streets of San Francisco I had taped a number of episodes. I re-watched them, studying the background details when the background was clearly San Francisco and not a studio set. A fellow author lived in San Francisco at the time and when I ran into him at a convention I pumped him for city details. It all went into a background book that ended up as thick as a manuscript. But then, I’m a compulsive list maker and even work from a checklist in constructing story backgrounds.
That helped me preserve continuity twenty years later when I wrote Blood Games, the third in the series...where through no fault of his own Mikaelian may have created his own vampire offspring. And for further research, wow what a difference the Internet made! Guide books still remained a great resource, but the Internet was almost as good as a visit, and let me search out information any time of the day or night without leaving home. I discovered that most cities have web sites, and so do many police departments, all loaded with useful data. The SFPD’s site has maps showing its city divisions, pictures of the division station houses, lists of its bureaus, pictures of command personnel.
These days the Internet is definitely my research buddy. Killer Karma, another supernatural mystery, has the ghost of a murdered SFPD Burglary detective solving his own death. For it I turned up San Francisco web sites with pictures of many locations I wanted to use as Cole Dunavan learned how being a ghost worked — it unfortunately didn’t come with an instruction book — hunted his killer, and sorted out other personal and professional problems that kept his spirit on earth. Embarcadero Center, where he finds himself in the parking garage with no memory at first except of his murder. The Hall of Justice of course, Noe Valley, the Richmond, Union Square. Some sites carried satellite photos. Some had live cam shots...the next best thing to being there. Consulting the Chronicle/Examiner web site gave me weather patterns and timely news articles. And of course I was back checking the SFPD’s web site.
Google maps are almost as good as traveling to a location. Almost. They don’t take you inside buildings, though, or let you experience touching and hearing the location. I was lucky enough to have serendipity provide what the budget had not previously. In the midst of planning Killer Karma, I attended a science fiction convention in San Jose. While we were there, Denny and I rented a car and visited the cemetery town Colma, one of the locations appearing in the book. That was quite an experience...acres of cemeteries surrounding a town geared to a single purpose: serving the dead. And when Alan Beatts of San Francisco’s Borderlands Books kindly ferried some fellow writers and me up to his store for a signing, I spent the half day before the signing walking the hills and riding buses around the city and being given a tour of the Hall of Justice. Which Alan also arranged for me. Later when I had questions about other locations that the Internet couldn’t answer, Alan, bless him, went out, took pictures, and e-mailed them to me. He was an angel and I love digital technology.
A TV show from my childhood, Naked City, used the line: “There are a million stories in the naked city.” What’s true for New York is no less so for San Francisco, so it’s likely the city will keep waving its hand when I need a story background. And I’ll keep using it.

                                   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 
Lee Killough has been storytelling since the age of four or five, when she started making up her own bedtime stories, then later, her own episodes of her favorite radio and TV shows. So of course when she discovered science fiction and mysteries about age eleven, she began writing her own science fiction and mysteries. It took a husband, though, years later, to convince her to try selling her work. Her first published stories were science fiction and one short story, "Symphony For a Lost Traveler", was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1985.

She used to joke that she wrote SF because she dealt with non-humans every day...spending twenty-seven years as chief technologist in the Radiology Department at Kansas State University's Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. At the same time, she also used to train horses. She has lived most of her life in Kansas, but when her late husband was in the Air Force at the end of the sixties, they lived two unforgettable years in Washington D.C. During which she witnessed the hippie invasion of Georgetown, the Poor People's march on D.C., urban riots that set fires in neighborhoods close to theirs, and their neighborhood crawling with police and FBI for a day while law enforcement tracked two men who gunned down an FBI agent a few blocks from their home.


Because she loves both SF and mysteries, her work combines the two genres. Although published as SF, most of her novels are actually mysteries with SF or fantasy elements...with a preference--thanks to a childhood hooked on TV cop shows--for cop protagonists. She has set her procedurals in the future, on alien words, and in the country of dark fantasy. Her best known detective is vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian, of Blood Hunt and Bloodlinks, reprinted together in an omnibus edition BloodWalk. She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters In Crime.


http://bookswelove.net/leekillough.php

 

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Afloat on an Iceberg: Creating Background by Lee Killough


Say “world-building” and most writers think “alien planets.” But every story happens somewhere and that “somewhere” needs building...not just for science fiction and fantasy but mysteries, westerns, spy thrillers, Regency romances, and the Great American Novel. Historical settings must be researched. So does any contemporary location not well known to the author. A real place a thousand miles away or a decade in the past can be as “alien” as another planet. If the plot uses supernatural elements — elves, magic, ghosts, psychics, vampires, werewolves — it needs a background allowing them to exist. And of course any fictional setting, even one close to the author’s Here and Now, needs to be developed. Take the example of a small town. No two are alike. Fast food franchises differ from area to area. So do supermarket and department store chains. A farming or ranching community will have different stores than a college town. Yearly rhythms are affected by harvest, working cattle, or the college schedule. In the latter case, depending on the number of town residents connected to the college, even the beginning and end of the grade and high school year may be determined by the college semesters. Towns in areas with tourist traffic or seasonal sports are likewise shaped by catering to the tourists and sports. Working out those details is world-building.
And I love it...whether creating a planet and aliens, building a fictional town, or checking out the history and present-day aspects of a real place on Earth. Reading about it, studying maps, talking to people who know it, traveling there if possible. If I cannot go there personally...thank you for the Internet and Google maps, where in many cities a street scene option lets me pick an address and virtually stand at pavement level where I can turn 360 degrees to see what the area looks like. The next best thing to being there. Constructing background is like putting together a puzzle...figuring out all the little details...the clothes, the food, the houses, local transportation, local amusements, local slang. It is making up the rules for a ghost, as I did in my book Killer Karma, determining out how he would move around, how he could become visible to people. It is making up rules for a vampire in Blood Hunt, Bloodlinks and Blood Games. Deciding that yes, he will have a reflection but no, he cannot enter a dwelling uninvited, because that presents a dramatic obstacle for a vampire who is also a cop. It is creating werewolves for Wilding Nights who do not have to worry what happens to their clothes in shifting to wolf form. For me, world-building is half the fun of writing the book. Never mind that most of the information I work out will never appear in the novel.
A waste? Not at all. Think of background as an iceberg. Only a small portion shows, those details necessary for the story, but the unseen bulk is equally important. Not only has it often suggested plot twists I might never have considered in the context of my own Here and Now, it is crucial support for what does appear in the story. When I read a novel, I want to feel as though I’m living in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, or Tony Hillerman’s Navaho country, or the ancient China of Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee. So I want my own books to give readers the same kind of experience. Which I can’t do without knowing novel’s world so thoroughly I am immersed in it as I write. I don’t want to end up with something like a romance I read years ago...and always remember as a warning to myself. Though set in South Africa, it had so little sense of place that the characters seemed to speak their lines in front of a blank backdrop.
Memorable characters might have saved the book for me, someone more than the stock naive protagonist, the Heathcliff-like love interest, and the catty other woman. Because while landscape sets mood and sometimes becomes a character in the story — what would Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles be without the brooding moors? — it doesn’t drive the story. Characters do that...and what makes them interesting and uniquely who they are is their background.
A big part of what we’re doing in world-building, then, is really culture-building. Culture envelops each of us from the moment of birth...permeating our lives, influencing us at fundamental but unconscious levels to shape our attitudes, our prejudices, our reactions. We know it is Harry Potter’s fate to fight Voldemort, but I think that because he was deprived of friends and a sense of belonging while living with the Dursleys, part of what drives his courage is the desire to protect the world of magic where he has found friends and a sense of belonging. Judge Dee believes in spirits because his ancient China does. In his time it was also considered acceptable to use torture in questioning criminal suspects, and because he is a man of his time, Dee uses torture. In Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are both Navaho policemen. But in Leaphorn’s boyhood, Indian children were taken from their families to boarding schools, where their own language and culture were forbidden in a government effort to assimilate the Navahoes into American society. As a result Leaphorn lacks emotional connection to traditional Navaho beliefs and looks on many of them as superstition. Jim Chee grew up on the reservation. He embraces his culture, and feels so strongly about it that he wants to be a shaman. The difference in their boyhoods affects how the two think and how they approach their police work. The traditional fear of the chindi, an evil spirit left after a person’s death, makes Chee reluctant to touch a corpse. Leaphorn has no such qualms. I want my characters, too, behaving in accordance with their own personalities and background, not mine. My werewolves in Wilding Nights are a separate species from humans who by passing as human have survived the extinction suffered by other hominids such as the Neanderthals. So while they live among humans, they wear masks, hiding their non-human attitudes, rituals, customs. Taking the wolf form uses massive amounts of energy so they have equally massive appetites that astonish the unknowing humans they work with. Their homes are built with walk-in restaurant-style refrigerators.
Like writing itself, there are as many ways to go about world-building as there are authors. All of them correct when they work. It is only wrong to skip doing it. You risk ending up with that the South African romance...or a Star Trek novel I read, where the Vulcans came across as American Suburbanites. Culture is so much a part of us that we tend to be unaware of its influence, and if a story’s background has not been fully worked out, our subconscious will likely fill the gaps with the only culture it knows...our own. Which, as in the Star Trek book, may not work. Or we can make erroneous assumptions. The Colt Peacemaker and the Old West seem synonymous, but if we have a Civil War veteran heading west in 1866 packing the Colt, Western fans will flay us. They know the Colt wasn’t manufactured until 1873.
Being a compulsive — some would say anal — organizer, I world-build by working through a checklist of fifty-plus culture-related categories. A checklist I developed by reading a slew of anthropological studies and seeing what criteria the pros use to describe a culture. Though I type my notes on a computer — up to a page or so per category, using as many categories as necessary (fewer being necessary the closer I am to my own Here and Now) — I print it out along with character biographies and make up a loose-leaf binder for easy reference while writing. The binder also contains maps, sometimes floor plans of relevant buildings, often pictures of story locations if it has a real-life setting, and pictures of vehicles the characters drive. In the case of an alien planet, I do sketches of animals and the aliens themselves.
It works well for me, but while other writers like and use my checklist, we agree that the tome I produce can be all wrong for another writer. Leafing through one of my background books, science fiction writer Jack Williamson confided that when he tried something similar in his early writing days, by the time he finished putting so much effort into the background, he had no creative energy left for the book itself and never wrote it. That is not a result we want. Mystery writer Charlaine Harris awes me because she keeps the worlds and characters of her Sookie Stackhouse, Aurora Teagarden, and Harper Connelly series in her head. I know other writers who do, too. More power to them. They all amaze me. Still other writers, for whom the writing process is one of discovering the story, say they make up background as they go along. One told me that if she knew all about the book before she started, the story would be told and no longer interesting enough for her to write down. I wonder, though, if the subconscious of such writers isn’t at work madly hammering that background together beneath their awareness. In any case, the method works for them...perhaps because they have the experience and skill to pull it off.
Books written that way by young writers too often tend to read like the authors made it up as they went along. Which may have been the case with the Star Trek novel. I feel that at least in the beginning, a writer should consciously work out details about their story background. Which does not have to be as involved or time consuming as my tomes. Some note cards or a computer file equivalent may be sufficient. Whatever it takes to help the author make his setting feel real and complete.
World-building does have a couple of pitfalls to watch out for. Such as killing a book by becoming so engrossed in creating the background that it turns from a tool to an end in itself. I always watch to make sure I’m not tinkering with background beyond alterations necessary to make the plot and characters work. After doing extensive background research on a subject, say San Francisco’s 1906 Great Quake and Fire, it is a huge temptation to cram all those fascinating facts into the story and not “waste” them. Which is why I have a picture of an iceberg prominently displayed on my bulletin board, reminding me to use only what the story needs.
Because the story is the point of it all, and world-building, however important, whether a game or labor, accomplished by whatever method, must in the end do just one thing...provide the characters with a solid and suitable place for telling their tale.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Killer Karma

Inspector Cole Dunavan finds himself in the middle of a parking garage with no memory except of his murder. After remembering who he is and accepting that he is now a ghost, he has more problems. He is a ghost with no idea how being a ghost works. No one sees or hears him. He cannot move objects and initially cannot move through closed doors. He learns to his horror that his body has not been found, and everyone thinks he has run off with a woman who is actually an informant. A woman whose life he may have put in danger. He must save her, find his killer, and show his wife he has remained faithful.



"Killough keeps the action driving forward, but does not neglect character development. We get to know our protagonist's loved ones, and to care about them. We begin to understand why the antagonists do what they do. Will there be any justice? Will anyone find out what happened to him, or will they believe the false report circulating? And if they do find out, what then? Killough does not give us easy answers. The climax of Killer Karma is a marvelous crescendo, both complex and poignant." ~ Sherwood Smith

"Killough has created more than a paranormal police procedural here. This is a novel about love and redemption, about friendship and possibility. Any reader who enjoys a good mystery with strong psychological elements, compelling characters, and a fascinating storyline will relish this one. I highly recommend it." ~ Pari Noskin Taichert, Fresh Fiction web site
 
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Lee Killough has been storytelling since the age of four or five, when she started making up her own bedtime stories, then later, her own episodes of her favorite radio and TV shows. So of course when she discovered science fiction and mysteries about age eleven, she began writing her own science fiction and mysteries. It took a husband, though, years later, to convince her to try selling her work. Her first published stories were science fiction and one short story, "Symphony For a Lost Traveler", was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1985.

She used to joke that she wrote SF because she dealt with non-humans every day...spending twenty-seven years as chief technologist in the Radiology Department at Kansas State University's Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. At the same time, she also used to train horses. She has lived most of her life in Kansas, but when her late husband was in the Air Force at the end of the sixties, they lived two unforgettable years in Washington D.C. During which she witnessed the hippie invasion of Georgetown, the Poor People's march on D.C., urban riots that set fires in neighborhoods close to theirs, and their neighborhood crawling with police and FBI for a day while law enforcement tracked two men who gunned down an FBI agent a few blocks from their home.


Because she loves both SF and mysteries, her work combines the two genres. Although published as SF, most of her novels are actually mysteries with SF or fantasy elements...with a preference--thanks to a childhood hooked on TV cop shows--for cop protagonists. She has set her procedurals in the future, on alien words, and in the country of dark fantasy. Her best known detective is vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian, of Blood Hunt and Bloodlinks, reprinted together in an omnibus edition BloodWalk. She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters In Crime.



Saturday, September 15, 2012

Behind the Cover: Cover Elements

By Michelle Lee
BWL Art Director

I know it’s been a while since my last post, and for that all I can say is – GRAD SCHOOL.  What, you thought I was going to say I’m sorry?  LOL  Did we miss the last post – I am a Goddess.  Goddesses do not apologize.

Wait a minute.  The hubby is trying to get my attention.

* Five minutes later *

Ok, so I have been informed that while I am a Cover Goddess, and the love and adoration of my husband’s life, (yeah, I added that in, sue me), that I am still, in fact, a mere mortal. Whatever!   

As such, I guess I can apologize for taking so long to get to the next topic in my Behind the Cover series of posts.  I know there are some readers eagerly awaiting the X-Factor post that is quickly coming up.  I believe slacker it a term I have heard muttered under someone’s breath a time or two.  No, wait, that’s at my day job.  Never mind.

Anyways ...

Back to the topic at hand … just what else goes into creating a cover.

So … After I put the images together to see how different elements look together, I place the title and author name on the cover (often not in the color or font that I will ultimately use, but rather just a generic placeholder to start to formulate placement).  Then I start to play around with all the elements – the images, the font (style, placement, color, and effects), shifting them around until I get something that I am happy with. 

Part of an effective cover is making sure the font matches the theme.

Let’s look at Destiny’s Shadow by Rita Karnopp.  Here, the font is of a western style, which is appropriate for a historical set during the time of western expansion.  Now what about a story set in the orient?  The font needs to have an asian feel.



But what if it is a chilling story?  Something a little dark …  Then you have something like the font for Into A Dangerous Mind.  It kind of has a surreal quality to it, which fits the theme of the story.

After I get everything placed, I start in on effects of the font.

That could by anything from a beveling, back-shadowing, to another layer of the same text in a different color.  Whatever it takes to make the text stand out from the images.  Because you want readers to be able to read what the cover says – and not just in a massive size, but also the tiny sizes a lot of websites use.  It has to stand out.

Once I get everything laid out so that it looks good, I start adding in the extras – little things that just make the cover pop.

 What do I mean?

Well … in some cases, it could be a border.  You can see a hint of a border on Into A Dangerous Mind (above).  But it blends in, adding a subtle effect to the cover rather than standing out.  So how about some that stand out.



See how the pearls in Ann Cory’s cover make the pearls the ladies are wearing kind of pop?  How about the rope around the edge of Ginger Simpson’s cover?

In others cases, it might be elements from the story; for example the cover for Impulsive.  This is a collection of stories by Jamie Hill, and I wanted to bring something from each into the cover.  So there is a bottle for the genie, a trumpet for another story, and snow for yet another.  


 We can also see elements of the story in Lee’s Killough’s cover.  This story involves a wolf, and a gun in some form or another – that much is evident from the cover.

 Its little things like that that assists a reader in knowing a little more about the story at first glance.  Obviously, the book’s blurb is a major information source.  But a lot of the times, a reader will see a cover long before the blurb (especially if they are skimming websites for something to read), so I have to make sure that I assist the author any way I can in drawing the reader in.  They’ve worked hard on their story, put together a blurb, made sure the title fits the books and is something that will catch attention, and then it falls on me to wrap their hard work in a pretty package.

At the same time, I have to be true to the reader – creating a cover that actually fits the book.  I know I would be very disappointed if I picked up a book with a smoking hot embrace between a couple, only to find out that all the intimate scenes are ‘fade to black/closed door’.  I would feel like the cover did not depict the book in a true light.  However, something with a soft fully-clothed embrace in a park or something would fit.

Well, I guess that’s it for this issue of Behind the Cover.  I believe the next topic up will be series.  And after that, the X-factor.  So stay tuned.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Behind the Cover: Images selection

By Michelle Lee
BWL Art Director

I’ve been called a Cover Goddess a couple of times, and as typical of me, I shrugged it off.  But now, I have decided, that if others are going to award me Goddess-ness, then I am going to start using it. So in true Goddess fashion, I have a few proclamations!

  1. No professor shall require a term paper to be written for any class that I am attending during my graduate coursework.  All term papers are to be voluntarily done for extra credit.
  1. No final shall be comprehensive.  In fact, finals shall be abolished!
  1. This crap with “self-teaching” is not going to happen anymore.  I am paying you, as my professor, to instruct.  Don’t tell me my learning is going to be self-guided.  If I wanted that, I would just buy the textbook and read it.
Wait … what?  You just want to hear the ones in regards to cover art.  You sure?  Cause I have a few more.  Well, okay …

Cover Art Proclamation 1:

No character, from this day forward, shall have hair.  None.  No wavy golden locks, no straight raven tresses.  Nadda, nothing.  Zero, zilch hair.

Number 2 …

What?  I can’t proclaim that characters can’t have hair anymore?  Why not?

Artistic freedom!  The heck you say!  But I am a Goddess … but, but …

*Insert several minutes of whining and whimpering*

Well fine then!

I guess I will return to the original topic I meant to address this blog post – image selection and how they relate to covers and artists.

The images that are picked for a cover are crucial.  CRUCIAL I say.  For, after all, they are the core of the cover.  And the cover is what a reader sees first.  Before the blurb, before the excerpt, generally they see the cover.

So you want a nice one.

You also want a sane cover artist.  S.A.N.E.  Got that?  Which means when you are selecting images to suggest, think about what you are asking for.

What I mean by that is, if the image has a woman with fly-away hair (you know what I am talking about, where it looks like a fan was turned on during the photo-shoot) and you don’t like the background, find a new image.  Isolating hair in images is tricky, so it is better if it lies fairly flat in the image.

Also, don’t pick a real dark image of a person, where they fade into a black background, and expect it to work with a sunny day beach scene behind him/her. 

It’s hard, as an author, to pick images.  I know – I am also an author.  So I know that there is a certain way a character is supposed to look, and often times, stock art is just too limited in options.  But doing photo-shoots for each and every e-book an author does is not cost-effective or practical.

So authors have to, in some ways, settle for what is available.  Which can be hard.

But if you take the time to make sure and pick images you are happy with, and that are easy to work with, you and your cover artist will both wind up happy with the finished product.

To that end, I am offering just a few suggestions, off the top of my head:

  • Don’t pick images with fly-away hair (see above) unless you LIKE the background
  • Don’t pick dark images, with dark background, and expect a bright background to be put in replacing it.  (Also see above)
  • Think about how many images you are suggesting.  Often, most covers have 1-3 images.  Any more than that gets costly.
  • Think about the perspectives of the images.  If you are looking flat on at a couple, and upward at the background you want behind them, it isn’t going to work together.
  • Make sure you know if the image is a photograph or computer generated.  Some times, a computer generated background can work in a cover – other times, it just doesn’t. 

For example, here’s one where it does work:


  • If you KNOW you are doing a series, and using the same characters, make sure there are other images of the SAME model that you like for future covers, and that there are enough for however many books you are planning.
  • If you know you are doing a series, think about the style of image, and make sure you can find other images in the same style to match your future characters.
  • Consider your images carefully – have you seen it/them on a ton of other covers?  If so, you should probably find something else unless you are just absolutely, completely in love with that image and it just fits perfectly and you have to have it or the world will just end in misery.
  • Be open to changes … I can’t stress this one enough.  Just because you suggest an image does not mean that it will be used.  Often times there is a very good reason why the cover artist will not use it (such as the sizes not being right, it is more long than tall – such as a woman laying down, it doesn’t match with the other images you selected, it can’t be isolated to fit with the other images, or there are terms that don’t allow for the image to be used on commercial items)
  • Speaking of isolating images, when you pick an image of a person, you want at least one side of their body to fully be in the image, not both sides running off of the image.  That allows for the person to be isolated from the background and merged with other images.  (Unless, that is, you just want that ONE image on your cover).
For example:



The image for CODENAME: ROMEO is one that I would not be able to move to the side.  Whereas the woman in WILDING NIGHTS I could move around the cover as needed.


  • If you are want the person moved into another background, be careful that you don’t pick an image with something from the foreground blending into the image.  For example, grass or wheat stalks, snow or rain, etc.  Both of these images work because they fit the changed background.  Had the author wanted either of these women at the beach, it wouldn’t have worked.



Well that’s all that I can think of right off.  Hope it makes selecting images just a little bit easier!

As for how I work them together, well, it’s not really something I can put to words.  I have to look at the angles/perspective of images, the colors and brightness/contrast to them, and just play around some times to get the right fit.

I do keep in mind previous covers I have done for the author, and also the genre. The hardest covers for me are mysteries and dark themes, since I like doing light covers.  I like happy couples – and especially SEXY couples.  Which can cause some problems, since I like sexy images, and some romances are sweet.  (So half-naked people just don’t work).

When I select images, I also keep my own “do/don’t” list in mind.  I also look at colors, and sharpness/starkness of images.  It a couple has almost a harsh lighting on them, then I won’t put them on a real soft focus background.  

Also, while brown/red hair can be switched fairly decently to the other, turning an image of a blond into a  raven haired person, vice versa, etc isn't that easy.  So I try my best to find images that fit the hair color as well as I can.

Eye color on the other hand is something that I can modify - so I never worry about it when I pick an image, because I know that I can modify it as needed (provided I know what color to change it to - so be sure to provide that info in your CAF).

Other than that, a lot of image selection for me is just flipping through images on stock sites and seeing if anything jumps out at me.  From there, I work all other elements around the image I selected.

If period clothing is required, then I will focus on the person, and worry about making the background fit.

If a setting is pivotal, and the couple’s attire isn’t that big of a deal, then I find a background that will work and then find a couple to fit.

And so on …



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