A Glint of Future

+ Cover redesigns

Lots of emails recently, but I’ve got a lot to show you as I’ve been saving it up for my birthday. Posts will be less frequent in September. I’ve got a story to tell you then, which I think you’ll like.

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Cover redesigns

I’ve been working on a ‘house style’ for a few months now and have finally created one that I like.

I do all my book covers myself. I started in 2020, wanting to save money during WBTH1’s development (and wanting to know how cover designers to it), but soon fell in love with the process. It’s nice to have so many creative outlets: I imagine it is why I never have burnout, at least not creatively.

I write to you now as someone who has had to cancel a few real-world events because socially I’m burnt out. Here I’m fine, but outside stuff is not easy right now.

It took me a long time to get good at cover design. The first WBTH cover worked with 3D glasses, which I hope to bring back soon. It was brilliant.

So far the 3D effect seems to work.

Anyway, I’ve been redesigning a lot of my covers, for old or upcoming books, and I wanted to show them to you.

I changed the cover for THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE ever so slightly, giving it a darker background. I had my reasons. This version is creepier and easier to read. It fits better with titles by other, more monied authors.

All these are already out or are coming out soon. If you’ve got WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? you already have SOLIPSISM, THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE, and most of FIVE FUTURES FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and BEYOND UNCERTAIN STARS (FFFAI has some extra stories, BUS has some extra chapters).

THE COSMONAUT WHO DIED TWICE and MYCELIAL are entirely new stories. If you’ve been here a while, you’ve read bits of their early drafts before, but these are so different to their original forms that they feel like different stories.

At some point soon, some of these eBooks will be made free for my subscribers here, in the hopes some of you have the time to review them. There’s no obligation to, but it would be nice. Reviews tell the retailers which books to show to customers. Without them, books vanish into the ether.

What do you think of the new covers?

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“Wait, aren’t four very important books missing?”

That’s right. Earthloop and The Stephanie Glitch are not here.

The first 25,000 words of TSG are ready to go, meaning I could implement a secret plan… or I could pitch it to a publisher.

I’m doing the second one.

I’m doing this for Earthloop too.

I don’t know how much I’m allowed to share online during this process, so it’s going a bit quiet for these two. But as soon as I know, I’ll tell you.

So those four are having a little rest as I work on WBTH2, just as planned.

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Even more covers?

The title of this email, A GLINT OF FUTURE, is a line stolen from a poem I wrote about the industrial revolution way back in 2015. Nobody was going to figure that out, so here I am telling you like a supervillain doing his final speech.

My poetry books, False Vacuum and Branch Density, will be coming out soon too, in paperback, and republished in eBook form too. They were already on Amazon as eBooks, but I have since learned that having space on the cover of a poetry book essentially stops any average poetry consumers from wanting to buy it. Should have gone for line drawings, but the only things I could do line drawings of from these books were closed timelike curves and cider cans.

That said, I very rarely see a poetry book with butterfly line drawings on the cover that actually has poems including butterflies inside the book.

Anyway, those books didn’t sell well (at all) and I’m relaunching them. I may even retitle them, make them feel a bit fluffier on the surface, and whack them on Kindle Unlimited.

And my giant Lego head will feature on the covers.

And if you put the books side by side, it will form a single image.

Fun!