What If I Did This!? uses a photo I took of my first keris, which I also used for my letterhead logo. (You can see the logo on the grip of the Colt .25 ACP pistol on the cover of Bristlecone, below, scrimshawed into the faux ivory by Yours Truly.)
No Man But A Blockhead uses a public domain clip-art concrete block. Both will be up on Amazon.com in a couple days, and I've changed them in the book listing here.
And the beat goes on ...
Very Nice scrimshaw - pen not darker than but more powerfull than the sword....or keris?....Colt trumps sometimes. Nice Colt - I think a silenced version .22 and .25 are in a lot of Jack Higgins books.
ReplyDeleteThe old joke about the .25 is that it's good if you don't have a real gun; that a heavy jacket is as good as Kevlar for stopping the bullet. Of all the handgun rounds, the standard .25 is rated the lowest in stopping power. (Might be a .22 Short is worse, but I can't find much data on that one.)
ReplyDeletePut a suppressor on it, it drops the velocity to that of an air pistol.
Still, the .25 ACP Browning was for a long time the smallest magazine-fed pistol around, and you could carry one in your bathing suit. It would go bang! and if you used hot loads and put them in the right spot, it would be better than waving your weenie at an attacker.
I might do more martial art books eventually, though I'm not sure -- much of what I have to say about it the subject days is silat-related, and less interesting if you don't have a background in that art. Very much niche kind of thing.
If you hate the cover art so much why don't you just hire someone? It would earn out eventually.
ReplyDeleteWhere did I say I hated the cover art? I said it wasn't my thing and nothing to write home to mother about, but I didn't say I thought it was *bad*.
ReplyDeleteI am, by and large, pleased with them. A couple of the early efforts weren't as clean as some of the later ones, and since all I have to do to change one is to pop up a replacement, how easy is that?
As far as I'm concerned, the only point of a cover illo is to get a potential reader to pick up the book -- or in the case of ebooks, click on a preview. After that, it's up to the writer. I don't think my self-generated covers are apt to win any awards, but I'm not trying for that. I'm not looking to impress illustrators or cover designers, only to pique a reader's curiosity.