Cover Reveal: Wicked Ambition

Wicked Ambition cover reveal!!!

Subscribers to my newsletter received the big reveal in the June edition. If you'd like to become a subscriber, you can sign up here. Just scroll down a little to the form.

I don't have a link yet for this book. It'll be up for pre-order toward the end of this month, closer to when Wicked Suspicion is released.

Here's the cover copy I have for the book:

Ayla Desmond never takes risks, but when she senses her twin is in trouble, she boards a plane to Puerto Jardin—a country teetering on the edge of chaos. As a Public Relations specialist at the Paladin League, she’s used to spin, not bullets. But this mission plunges her into a deadly game where trust is scarce and danger is everywhere.
 
Special Forces Sgt. Oziah “Wizard” West is the king of one-night stands, but he hasn’t been able to forget the last woman he hooked up with, a mysterious blonde who slipped away from his hotel room. When he spots her in Puerto Jardin, he knows there’ll be trouble. Oz rushes to her side, determined to keep her safe.
 
Ayla wants nothing to do with Oz. He’s a mistake she’d rather forget, but circumstances force them together. Surrounded by mercenaries and stalked by an arms dealer who believes she holds the key to a hidden treasure, she has no choice but to rely on the enigmatic stranger who ignited her passion. As danger escalates, so do their feelings, and then a positive pregnancy test changes everything.
 
Now, Oz risks not only his heart but also his life to protect Ayla and their unborn child. Can they survive the treacherous game they’re caught in, or will their love become the ultimate casualty?

I will post a link when the pre-order is live. It should be soon.

Cover for Dark Awakening

Dark Awakening never had its own cover because it was part of an anthology called Shards of Crimson, which had four Crimson City stories. Now that Team Crimson City is working to publish our stories in electronic format, Kimi and Nic finally get a cover. As I blogged earlier, finding stock photos with multicultural characters was very difficult. Nic doesn't look very much like the Nic I saw when I wrote the story, but I think the cover turned out awesome anyway.

I'd written the cover copy for this story back in 2006 because I wanted a description of my story for my website even if the back cover copy on the actual anthology was more specific to Crimson City as a whole.

Kimi Noguchi is working as an intern for an advertising agency in Crimson City and she's discovered that she's a kijo or witch. She thinks having talent is cool, but her magic attracts the attention of a power-hungry Bak-Faru demon and she's forced to call on another demon, Nicodemus, for help.

Nic made a promise to stay away from Kimi for her own good, but now that she's summoned him, all bets are off. She's his vishtau mate, a bond held in reverence by all demons, and he's not about to let this opportunity pass him by. Nic plans to protect, woo and win his woman.

This was the first time I'd ever written anything short. I tend to go over the word count numbers in my contracts by a pretty good amount. What can I say? Bonus story for readers, right? Sometimes it just takes a while for a story to unfold, and despite my attempts to prod them along, I can't get my characters to move faster than they do.

The first ever cover for Dark Awakening...drum roll, please:

Stay tuned for more on when Team Crimson City will have the series available in ebook.

New Cover for Through a Crimson Veil!

When I blogged a couple of weeks ago about having so much trouble finding stock photos to use on covers, it was because I was in the middle of having covers made for Through a Crimson Veil and Dark Awakening. For those of you who are going Dark Awakening, huh? This is my Crimson City novella that was in the Shards of Crimson anthology.

Well, Through a Crimson Veil is finally available electronically! I'm still waiting on Amazon, but if you have a Nook, it's up at BN.com. The story is also up in EPUB and Mobipocket PRC format at ARebooks and in a variety of formats at Smashwords.



Here's the new cover copy I wrote for the book:

When a sexy half demon asks Conor McCabe for protection, he can't say no and he doesn't understand why. He hates demons. He doesn't want to help her. He doesn't want to want her, but every minute he spends with her strengthens his need to keep her safe—and intensifies the desire burning between them.

Mika Noguchi sought out Conor to steal the key that can free all demons imprisoned in Orcus. She quickly regrets her mission—Conor is her destined mate and he'll view her theft as betrayal—but she gave her word to the council and the penalty for breaking it is severe.

Other demons are loose in Crimson City, however, and they have their own plans. They're not about to let anyone stand in the way. Not Conor. Not Mika. They'll do anything it takes to advance their agendas—even kill.

Writing cover copy is sooo hard. This totally made me appreciate my editors and anyone else at my publishers who wrote it for my books. I still have to come up with a short, one sentence blurb for Crimson Veil, but I'll get there.

And here's the cover:

BTW, Team Crimson City is working to get our books up in electronic format. More info to come.

The Art of Cover Copy

When someone picks up a book in the bookstore and turns it over to read the back cover to find out what the book is about, they're looking at something that probably took hours to write. Producing good back cover copy requires a lot of skill. Basically, the writer has two paragraphs to tell what the story is about and to make it interesting to the reader. Most authors don't write this themselves.

I have several theories for this. One is that authors are too close to their work to pull out the key strand and create a concise, exciting summary. Two is that just because someone is good at one kind of writing doesn't mean they're good at all kinds of writing.

Starting with the second point first, I can't write a business letter to save my life. I agonize over the thing and end up going with: Enclosed please find....Thank you. Um, yeah. My letters always come across awkward and stilted. That applies even to business email. Writing book copy is along those lines. It's a specialized skill that needs to be honed.

Actually, as an advertising copywriting major in college, the blurb strikes me as ad copy. When I was in school and I was writing ad copy every week if not every day, I got very good at it. But I didn't go into advertising and I haven't exercised my ad copy writing muscles in a long time. They're atrophied now and it's agonizing to try to sum up a 400 page book in two paragraphs. It's agonizing to try to sum up a 60 page short story in two paragraphs now.

Which kind of leads into the first theory--a lot of writers have a hard time distancing themselves from every nuance of their work. Me included. I keep pulling in side issues that relate to the main thread, but really aren't appropriate for the two paragraphs of cover blurb. My advertising background tells me this, but the author part whispers yeah, but it's important.

I'm gaining new appreciation for the writers of my book jacket copy. I'm trying to write a couple of paragraphs of description for my two short stories, Blood Feud and The Troll Bridge. It's hard!

I'm doing better with Blood Feud. On this one the thread is pretty clear to me--it's a Romeo and Juliet kind of story where the vampires are the Capulets and the demons are the Montagues. Or vice versa. Only instead of dying, this star-crossed pair have been separated for the past two hundred years. Now, a demon is killing vampires and the two of them must work together to find the killer before all-out war breaks out between their peoples.

The Troll Bridge is another story. Um, no pun intended. Sorry. I can kind of see the main thread--there's an accident at a particle accelerator and Lia is pulled through a wormhole. She ends up in 2050 on Jarved Nine. Do I mention she's suspected to be a spy or not? Do I mention that Troll is part of Wyatt's team from Eternal Nights? Probably not, but is that a selling point for a reader?

This is really hard work! I guess I owe a belated thank you to all the people who wrote the cover copy on my books, so Thank you!

Rabbit One, Patti Zero

I went down to water and weed my flower bed yesterday afternoon and between Wednesday evening when I watered and Thursday afternoon, that damn rabbit returned. This time she wasn't content to merely chomp on my lily leafs. Oh, no, this time she gnawed off some of the flower buds as well. And left them on the ground!

That rabbit is so lucky I would never dream of deliberately harming any living thing, because if I wasn't such an animal lover, I would have gone hunting wabbit. :-) I was not happy.

When I finished weeding, I put out the SOS call to my dad. He came over with mothballs and strew them around the inside of the tree ring and near my peony tree. This is supposed to be better at keeping rabbits away than fencing, but if it doesn't work, he has some of that ready to go if we need to fall back to Plan B.

I swear, who would have guessed that plants were in such danger? First a cut worm, now a rabbit. It's a jungle out in suburbia and I've been oblivious.

I used my new handy, dandy garden tool and it worked fine. It's my only garden tool, so that's a good thing. :-) While I was weeding, I dug up a couple of the bulbs to see if they were mushy or okay. Both were solid, so I'm guessing the rest are fine as well and that next year they'll grown and bloom and be wonderful. If that's the case, it means there was only one fatality in my garden--a toad lily. Those weren't bulbs, so there are no second chances for them. Three are up and small, but at least that's something.

My editor emailed me yesterday asking me to provide some input for back cover copy. Despite my college training to be an advertising copywriter, I totally stink at this. I came up with something that wasn't totally horrible, but I reread it this evening (hours after I sent it) and realized I'd totally left out everything about the romance. It's all about the action and story. Picture me slapping my forehead.

I'm actually doing better at the one line to describe the book thing. I came up with something for In the Midnight Hour that I really loved and I think what I came up with for In Twilight's Shadow is pretty good too. Not as good as Midnight, but hey, lightning doesn't usually strike twice. :-)

And last bit of news, Barnes & Noble put up a link to my book video on the page for Midnight Hour. It's on the sidebar and I'm not sure how easily seen it is, although I spotted it immediately. :-)