Check out the cover of Brent Weeks’s third book in the Lightbringer series, THE BROKEN EYE, which will be out next summer. Also look for THE BLACK PRISM (US | UK | AUS) and THE BLINDING KNIFE (US | UK | AUS) — available now in trade paperback!
Design by Lauren Panepinto, Illustration by Silas Manhood, Photography by Shirley Green. Click to enlarge.
All my life I’ve done everything wrong, and yet oddly enough, it works for me. I didn’t graduate college. I didn’t wait to get married, and yet I’ve stayed married to the same woman for thirty years. I didn’t take courses, or read books on how to write, and I gave up my dream of getting published after twenty years of trying. I wrote a six book traditional fantasy series with wizards, dwarves, and elves when such a thing was considered absurd. I self-published when no self-respecting writer would stoop so low, and I signed a contract with a major New York publisher when everyone else was making a fortune in self-publishing. So it should come as no surprise that the next book of mine to be released on August 6th through Orbit, THE CROWN TOWER (US | UK | AUS), is a prequel—because rumor has it no one likes prequels.
As usual, I didn’t know there was a stigma regarding prequels any more than I knew there was a stigma around traditional fantasy, or self-publishing until after I did it. Ignorance is bliss, and they say God watches out for children, drunks, and fools. This may be the case, but I refuse to admit which of those I am.
Prequels are apparently disliked for the same reason people dislike sequels and prologues, except prequels are a combination of both. They have been known to feel tacked on and they also precede the interesting events of the primary story. You can feel a yawn approaching just looking at the cover of such a book. Prequels are usually about the childhood years, or possibly even the parents of some main character, and very likely have nothing at all to do with the original story. Once again not knowing all of this, not knowing how I was supposed to build a prequel, I failed to follow these rules. Instead I made the fateful error of fleshing out an origin-story for a legend.
Because I also made the error of writing a fantasy series that didn’t include the formative years of my main characters—preferring to focus on them after they’d actually become interesting—I had skipped the episode where Peter Parker is bitten by the radioactive spider, Clark Kent crashed on Earth, and Bruce Wayne sees his parents murdered, (I really hope those weren’t spoilers for anyone.) For me it just felt logical to include that story. The fact that the majority of my readers requested it didn’t hurt either. (more…)
Welcome to the most in-depth, behind-the-scenes, play-by-play account of how a cover is born, from the point of view of the Art Department. We’re charting the conception and birth of the Shadowdance series by David Dalglish.
So last week we talked about the first real step of a book, Acquisition, which is how a manuscript finds it’s way from the author to the editor, usually via an agent. We’re glossing over a ton of Editorial detail because this is a series about covers, but rest assured, there’s a lot of meetings, discussion, impassioned debate, etc. going on there. I mention it as part of the cover process at all, because, as Devi mentioned, at Orbit, discussing possible cover directions can often help us decide whether or not we are going to try to acquire a new author, series, or book. Very frequently Tim or one of the editors will brainstorm with me about what kind of cover a book they’re thinking of acquiring might have. How would it be different from the other books in the same subgenre at Orbit already? Would it be a chance to do something awesome and push the look of covers in the marketplace? Do I have a gut feeling initially about whether it would have to be photo, or illustration, or design? This can be dangerous because asking me to think about a cover direction is like letting a greyhound out of the starting gate and my brain is halfway down the track before I remind myself that we might not end up buying the book and then I’ll be all disappointed.
So, because at Orbit we’re all brainstorming on things all the time, Acquisition kind of bleeds into this stage, Cover Briefing. Which is when Art & Editorial have a meeting and Editorial officially tells Art to start working on a cover. Over the years I’ve refined a “Cover Briefing Form” to help Editorial get all of their thoughts down on paper. It’s not so critical that every piece of info is final, it’s more of a jumping-off point for a discussion. For example, if you look at the Cover Briefing Form for the first Shadowdance book, A DANCE OF CLOAKS (US | UK | AUS), you’ll see the tagline was different, and we didn’t have a quote yet. But Devi and I had already talked about how we wanted to focus on cloaks and movement and dance, so she already put that in the notes.
Cover Briefing A Dance of Cloaks
We also talk about what the priorities for a cover are – simply put, what things do we want the cover to say, and in what order. Alex Lencicki, our Marketing and Publicity Director also comes to the cover launch, and he contributes greatly in talking about what the target audience for a book would be, what is going on in the rest of the marketplace, what competition would be for this book, etc. For this series we knew we wanted great dynamic action first, we wanted to grab people with the cool factor of the action as our first priority. Target audience was slightly more dominantly male, but not exclusive to female fans. We were looking to please our genre audience, but also attract some action movie fans as well.
Any author input already given to the Editor will be discussed at this stage, and often the Editor and I will talk about what materials I can get started on – do we have a manuscript ready to read? Just a few sample chapters? I also find it really helpful to make sure to check in with the author at the beginning of the cover process, either through the editor or directly with the author. I think Orbit is pretty unique in that I try to keep the authors as much in the loop as possible through the cover process. In SFF, so much is created straight out of the author’s imagination, it’s really helpful to hear world building details and ideas directly from them. Some have even made pinterest inspiration boards that I can look at for inspiration. At this stage I really have no idea what direction we’re going to take, I’m just gathering as much info as I can, to stew on for a little while.
When I began writing the Night Angel trilogy, I deliberately started with a world in which there were few magic users, and most people would rarely encounter one during their lives. I mentally compared them to professional athletes in our world–if you have a normal job, you might glimpse a seven-foot tall basketball player walking through the airport someday, and be awed. On the other hand, if your job is an athletic trainer or referee, you might see professional athletes every day, so as the Night Angel trilogy progressed and the characters grew, we saw more and more magic.
In Lightbringer, I wanted to go high magic. After all, why not? I soon found out. Mo’ magic, mo’ problems.
Having lots of magic makes for lots of narrative problems. First, the main problem for any secondary world fantasy is setting the stage, defining the rules, the institutions, the time period, the religious and cultural beliefs and all the other expectation-setting that we’ve come to call world building. In Night Angel, I’d given myself a low bar to clear: at least at first, the world is straight-forwardly quasi-medieval European. You’ve been there before, you can make good guesses about how things work. In Lightbringer, we’re in a different place and time entirely: this is a Renaissance era quasi-Mediterranean setting. Not only is there a huge number of real cultures to draw from, but it was already a time of rapid technological and social change.
Take one small example: up until 1480, sailors aimed their cannons by resting them on the gunnel (the gun-wale), literally the side of the boat. You propped it up, moved it closer or farther to adjust elevation, and boom. But if the other ship got too close, you couldn’t hit their decks anymore. Then someone had a bright idea: you put the gun belowdecks and made little doors to open when you wanted to fire. Thus the boat could still be relatively watertight, and you could shoot at the hull of the other ship for as long as you could still shoot.
Within twenty years, the idea of portholes had spread throughout the entirety of the Mediterranean basin. No one was shooting from the gunwale any more.
But no one treats magic like this. In secondary world fantasy, usually the only person to do anything new or game-changing with magic is the protagonist. Entire towers full of magicians do research for hundreds of years, and they never learn anything new.
Welcome to the most in-depth, behind-the-scenes, play-by-play account of how a cover is born, from the point of view of the Art Department. We’re charting the conception and birth of the Shadowdance series by David Dalglish. I’ll be your emcee thru the process, with all the important players chiming in.
The first stage of any book being born is Acquisition, or how an editor comes to find and buy a book to publish. This can happen a few ways, but by far the most common is for an agent to pitch the manuscript to an editor. Agents are a very important part of the publishing process. They’re kind of gatekeepers, coaches, and parents, all rolled up into one. They know the editors working in their genres, and they know what kinds of manuscripts each publishing house is looking for.
Although I do hear a lot about what goes on in the acquisition process, I’m not officially part of it. A lot of times the editors here will have a chat with me about the book they’re considering, see what I think we can do with the covers, etc. – but for the most part, this is more Editorial’s game, so I’ll let you hear from Devi Pillai, Editorial Director of Orbit, and the author himself, David Dalglish. Before I do, though, keep in mind that this was a slightly different case, as David had self-published the series already. Above you can see the original covers he produced for the first 3 books. We’ll talk in the next post about comparable titles and marketplace considerations, but in general, they’re very nice quality compared to a lot of what I see in the self-published world, so I was happy to be working with an author who had some grasp of what makes a good cover.
FROM DEVI:
Michael Carr, David’s fantastic agent, sent me an email asking if I was interested in David Dalglish’s Shadowdance series. I, of course, was over the moon to get a chance at working with David and his world. We immediately started the acquisition process which involves considering how we wanted to position the books (which includes the metadata, the covers, etc). We determined that the books would be better presented as a series versus a trilogy, so we knew we had to change the cover style for all six books. To do this, I brought in Lauren and Kirk from the Art Department to discuss what the cover direction would be. We thought that David’s covers had presence with his existing audience, but with rebranding the series, we wanted to go in a different direction. We loved the photographic, yet very martial arts look of movies like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and thought a cover using Haern’s cloakdance would be the best portrayal of the series.
FROM DAVID:
When I first came up with the idea for A DANCE OF CLOAKS (US | UK | AUS), the book was very much inspired by Brent Weeks’s Night Angel trilogy. Those covers of his, I adored. I studied them a ton, wanting to pick up the subtler things as a way of helping to identify my own books as belonging in a similar vein and genre. I loved the white space, the solitary figure, and the little flourish of color that helped seal it together. And it was those elements I shamelessly ripped off implemented as well. I had a figure upon white background (the faceless woman, Zusa), and it was her deep red cloak that added the flourish of color, as well as a nice artistic over-the-top decoration as it looped around.
Going in, I had a feeling what the new covers would be like, at least in concept. Simply put: they were going to put Haern on the cover. Now I didn’t know if he’d be on all of them like he is now, but I knew he’d be gracing the cover of book one, and most likely be looking badass. Beyond that, I could only cross my fingers and wait to see what Orbit’s art department came up with.
So in one respect, I was curious how Orbit might remain faithful to my original covers, yet not end up duplicating one of their own previous covers. Was it even possible?
With publication of WITCH WRAITH (UK | ANZ), the final installment of The Dark Legacy of Shannara, today, we thought we’d take a look back at this incredible series. You already know Terry has fans in his peers, with authors such as Brent Weeks, Christopher Paolini and Peter V. Brett all singing his praises, but readers have also flocked to this series. If you’re a fantasy fan yet to experience the fast-paced adventure, incredible magic and complete epicness of the world of Shannara, this series is the perfect place to start.
The design of the Shannara books spreads the story line across centuries, yet also makes it easy for new readers to jump in at any point . . . a grand example of the best of the best in the genre‘ – The Washington Post
“This may be the best Shannara novel in years. Highly recommended” – SFRevu
“Explodes from the first page . . . and the action doesn’t stop until the novel’s cliffhanger ending. . . . Intense and exhilarating . . . The author balances character development with intense action, and he has a gift for creating characters the reader cares about. Brooks is one of the best fantasy writers in the business, and Bloodfire Quest is better than its predecessor – Associated Press
“Wards of Faerie is the best novel Brooks has written in years . . . It’s full of hair-raising escapes, twists to established traditions and set pieces familiar to Shannara fans and characters, interesting magic and monsters and diverse relationships – A Dribble Of Ink
“Shannara fans will delight in Brooks’s sorcerous action, skilled characterizations, and rapid-fire storytelling twists” – Publisher’s Weekly
“From the first pages to the harrowing ending, Bloodfire Quest . . . is a thrill ride that will leave readers wanting more. . . . This volume, paired with the first, might be just the right place to introduce new readers to this fine writer” – Booklist
Watch Terry Brooks read the first chapter of WITCH WRAITH
As you may have seen start to spread across the interwebs, the new Orbit covers for David Dalglish’s Shadowdance series have been released (to great early acclaim! yea!). We knew from the very start that these covers were going to be a special project, and thus, we thought, damn, this would be an awesome opportunity to do a behind-the-scenes series more in depth than anyone has ever documented before. So everyone here in the Orbit Art Department – and everyone who worked on this freelance – have kept records of all the stages and steps that it took to make these covers a reality. We’ve even got video footage!
If you have ever wanted to know what went into creating a book cover, absolute start to the very final end, from acquisition on thru to final books, well, you’re in for a treat. We’ll me taking an in-depth look at the stages of the cover development. I will be your host, and I will have everyone involved in the process chime in.
Since this is kind of an epic undertaking, we’ve already plotted out exactly what the posts are going to be, and I’ll list them here, so you can get excited. And as we go along, if there’s specific questions you have about that stage of the process, feel free to comment, I’ll try to answer all your questions. So whether you’re a fan, an aspiring author, or an artist, stay tuned for the entire cover process, start to finish:
(and maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a few bonus posts along the way)
By Elizabeth Moon
When my first novel came out in 1988, SHEEPFARMER’S DAUGHTER (UK|ANZ), some readers commented favorably on its “gritty reality.” People died in war, some gruesomely (one of a suppurating gut wound, a baby accidentally trampled, civilians made an example of by one or another mercenary force), and that included characters readers identified with as well as those they didn’t. Later in that group of books, the protagonist suffered more wounds, unjust and cruel reactions as an aftermath of “treatment” for mental invasion, and torture. Some readers were horrified that a woman would write such graphic violence; others admired an honest appraisal of the costs of both war and heroism.
Yet the point of the story was not that war is hell, that people are capable of cruelty, that violence has unexpected costs that land unfairly on the innocent. That’s common knowledge. The point of the story was how people – as characters – deal with this reality. How some become bitter, angry, resentful, and willingly participate in the cruelty. How others do not, and instead work against the cruelty – sometimes violently and sometimes by choosing to stand with victims, without resisting.
Gritty reality has been associated, in some other writers’ works, with a determination to deny the possibility of glory – of redemption, of steadfast adherence to good, of achievement. Some even seem to believe that the good are just stupid, too stupid to realize that you have to be bad to survive. That’s not my perspective. I’ve known too many good people who were also intelligent and street-smart, surviving well without knifing everyone else in the back. I’ve known too many other people who used the “good = stupid” argument to defend their own cowardice and complicity in evil.
Does good win easily? Of course not. Does good always win? Of course not. Does one battle win a war, or one war win anything forever? Of course not. But I stand on the side of those who think that good can win . . . if. If what? If those trying to make things better don’t give up, don’t sell out, don’t lose hope that their efforts are worthwhile. If they learn enough about themselves to recognize where they are part of the problem . . . and then have the courage and will to change. LIMITS OF POWER (UK|ANZ) is part of a series that challenges adults – not kids becoming adults – to change repeatedly, to become more than they were. (more…)
Today we release the paperback of BLOODFIRE QUEST (UK|ANZ) – book two in Terry Brooks’s Dark Legacy of Shannara series following WARDS OF FAERIE (UK|ANZ). It’s a new epic fantasy set in the author’s core Shannara world, and it’s been knocking people’s socks off:
‘Explodes from the first page…the action doesn’t stop until the novel’s cliffhanger ending…Intense and exhilarating…Brooks is one of the best fantasy writers in the business’ ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘[Brooks] brings his distinct talent, giving a true grandeur to clashes involving terrifying creatures and powerful magic’ KIRKUS REVIEWS
‘A thrill ride that will leave readers wanting more…This volume, paired with the first, might be just the right place to introduce new readers to this fine writer’ BOOKLIST
The third book, WITCH WRAITH (UK|ANZ), is released very soon on 16th July.
Back in April, Terry did a very rare signing in the UK for the hardback release of BLOODFIRE QUEST. The queues at Forbidden Planet were phenomenal, and the signing went on for hours! See some pics of the event here.
For those who were unable to make it, we asked readers to send in their questions for this fantasy legend from afar. Now, we release Terry’s answers in the video below:
ps. Is it just me or is Terry awesome? No – the signs say it’s not just me . . .
ICE FORGED (US | UK | AUS) launched the popular new Ascendant Kingdoms Saga in January 2013, and Book Two, REIGN OF ASH, is coming in early 2014. Author Gail Z. Martin is doing her annual “sneak peek” Hawthorn Moon event featuring REIGN OF ASH beginning June 21 with an international blog tour, podcasts, excerpts, readings, giveaways and more. We asked her what readers should expect from Reign of Ash and afterwards show off the fantastic cover of the upcoming novel.
Q: What can you tell us about where Reign of Ash will take Ascendant Kingdoms readers?
A: Reign of Ash picks up right after Ice Forged, with Blaine McFadden’s quest to restore his homeland of Donderath. As Ice Forged readers know, the quest isn’t completed at the end of Book 1 because there is so much more to do, so much damage to overcome. It’s going to take all that Blaine and his friends have to give to survive!
Q: How have Blaine, Kestel, Piran and the other Ice Forged characters changed going into Reign of Ash?
A: Exile and prison brought Blaine’s group together, so they’re used to having each others’ backs. That serves them well in the very dangerous and unstable conditions in post-war Donderath. Now that they’re free, there will be choices to make. Blaine is still very much at the center of the group, and in Reign of Ash, several new characters get added to the circle, some old friends and new allies. Going forward, they will be at the heart of bringing the ruined kingdom back to life, and the paths they choose will determine Donderath’s future.
Q: Will we see more of Connor and Lord Penhallow?
A: Absolutely! Bevin Connor remains an important viewpoint character. We met him in Ice Forged fleeing for his life when Donderath fell, and see him emerge as an unexpectedly heroic person. No one is surprised at that more than Connor himself! In Reign of Ash, Connor grows into an even more important role, playing an enormously important part in the book’s life-or-death climax.
Q: Will Ice Forged’s bad guys be back for more?
A: Bet on it! Pentreath Reece and Vedran Pollard have their own agenda for the post-war wreckage, and their vision involves seeing themselves emerging as the ultimate power players. Anarchy breeds opportunists, so Reece and Pollard are in their element, and the only thing standing in their way is Blaine McFadden. Expect serious fireworks! (more…)
