Create A Snazzy Cover

When you publish an ebook you're going to need a cover.

I like pretty girls and I won't balk at buying a book with a pretty girl on the cover. Obviously, I'm not into Regency Romance novels, but if I were I'd be on the lookout for books with a pretty boy on the cover--some dashing Captain back from the war in a pirate shirt. Maybe holding a sword and looking swashbuckling.

And a girl holding a sword looking swashbuckling is appealing, too. I'm not trying to be a sexist jerk here. I'm just saying that your ebook will have a market and that market will respond to the cover of your book.

Sex sells. If you are gnashing your teeth at the intimation that an attractive female might be reduced to an object of commerce, you might take comfort that attractive males can be so objectified, too. And this is the problem with using sex to sell: you can easily offend unawares or unintentionally. Tread tastefully.

If you are a closet Rembrandt, then all you need do is dash off a pleasing study of your main character doing something interesting--hopefully with a gun or swashbuckling. Sadly, I am not a closet Rembrandt, or Picasso, or anybody else. My art is best pinned on refrigerators with little magnets.

With this in mind I set about finding an artist. Here's what I did and it has worked out quite well for me: I went to Google image search and put in "steampunk" because I was looking to publish a Sherlock Holmes story. I confined the search to deviantart.com. After paging through a few hundred images, I found one I liked. Then I looked at the artist's portfolio and liked what I saw. (I recommend you look for a particular "style" that you find agreeable.)

A few moments later I emailed Joanne Renaud asking if she might do the cover art for The Aristotelian. She would and she quoted a price I found fair. We drew up a simple contract to do the art and get paid. PayPal provided a satisfactory conduit for payment. Joanne and I live in different states, but we were able to make effective use of email, facebook & twitter to convey my vision to her and to get back drafts.

Your publishing project may include a different mix of specialists, and you should learn to work effectively with each business partner. I recommend that you keep the questions "what" and "how" clear in your mind. You own the "what" and your specialist owns the "how."

I regard Joanne as a business partner and I value her opinions about artsy stuff. I would propose ideas and ask if they worked artistically. I had a devil of a time describing what a Lasanian skycycle looked like and I ended up googling images and saying "like this, but elliptical." I suppose that had we been able to share sketches on the back of a napkin, it might have gone faster.

You should learn to do rough sketches and storyboards. More on that later...

It is important to share a clear vision of what you want to the cover to look like. I recommend going through bookstores and finding the covers that jump out at you. I suggest standing about 20 feet away from a shelf of books and then look at their covers. If they pop out visually, consider something like them. Then go to Amazon, where most people will be making the buying-decision for your book, and look at what works for you. And understand why it works for you.

I devised a sort of "grammar" of what the big-money book designers are doing and I tried to implement something like that in Finding Time. In the case above, I took inspiration from both Sarah Hoyt's Darkship Thieves and also Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

Ender's Game is an interesting book-cover-study. Do a Google image search on the cover. You'll see how cover design has evolved in the last three decades. The cool, angular space ships and funky typefaces of the '80s have been replaced with something that's more personal and more iconic.

You'll want to think a bit about your cover lettering. It should mesh with your story. I picked a Trajan typeface for Finding Time because it was more "timeless" and I used an Algerian typeface for The Aristotelian because it was more "Victorian."

But don't do what I tell you, do what you think works for you.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Steampunk Within The Boundaries Of Reason Alone

The title of this post derives from a 1793 book by Immanual Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone. Kant was one of the framers of the Age of Reason.

I recently saw a Kickstarter project called Steam Patriots that looks really cool. This project is seeking $100k to develop a series of steampunk novellas wherein George Washington and Benjamin Franklin fight the American Revolutionary War with airships and lightning-bolt rifles. The pictures create stunning visual impressions. I love it.

BUT since I am working on a steampunk project myself, it got me thinking about the constraints I've put upon my own writing.

My work-in-progress, Steamship to Kashmir, is set in the Victorian era. Mycroft Holmes is pursuing a murderer around the world in a nuclear-powered-steam airship. A fission reactor can be used for heat to flash water into steam and one can build a lighter-than-air craft that uses steam instead of hot-air, helium or hydrogen as a lifting gas.

Though Holmes' era had Jules Vern's SF, with a presumably nuclear submarine 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, small details like Madam Curie's discovery of radium had not yet occurred. Nor had X-rays, neutrons, alpha-, beta-, and gamma-radiation been discovered. How can I plausibly depict the girl shown on the right controlling a critical fission reaction? I suppose by the same rationale we use to suppose Captain Nemo powering the Nautilus with nuclear power.

Another problem for me is that the German fellow named Zeppelin who did so much work in rigid-framed airships. He is not yet accomplished or famous by the time my story takes place. Hard to tell the reader that the steamship to Kashmir is a Zeppelin when the term hasn't been invented in Mycroft Holmes's time.

And I have a problem with computers. Mycroft Holmes as a mathematician would have intimate knowledge of Charles Babbage's proposed Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. He can reasonably be expected to exploit such machines to the fullest. Yet the capabilities of these machines are dramatically constrained when compared with our own computers or even those of Alan Turing's time in WW2. Babbage machines could do things like ballistic trajectories, or compute math tables. These are not particularly glamorous applications to put into a story.

So, I'm carrying around all these constraints on what technology that I can deploy in Steamship to Kashmir and then I see the Steam Patriots project.

Really? Can you call 18th century American Revolution steampunk? Isn't that 100 years early? Can you get away with that?

Push 50 years after the Victorian era and you're in World War 2. Stories wherein advanced technology deployed in the 1940s is termed Dieselpunk to distinguish its look and feel from the earlier era of Queen Victoria.

Shouldn't the pre-steam American Revolution be termed something besides Steampunk? Something evocative of Kant or Voltaire? The age of steam was decades away. They were barely 100 years after Isaac Newton got hit by an apple and reinvented Calculus. The zeitgeist of 1776 was pre-steam, but I can't think of a suitable replacement term for steampunk.

Or maybe not. James Watt's patent on the steam engine was 1769 so it might work. Barely.

In the meantime, I'm totally jazzed by the George Washington and Benjamin Franklin images I've embedded in this post. The Steam Patriots project looks to be a lot of fun. I wish I had an extra $500 jingling around to spend on getting a fancy print of that Benjamin Franklin lightning bolt picture. (I'm a sucker for that style of pictures.)

You should check out Steam Patriots for yourself.

Sherly, You're Joking

I recently saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie. And I liked it. But not the way you're thinking. If you want to see a great action movie, by all means take in Game Of Shadows.

But the movie reminds me of a local restaurant called Twisted Rooster. They have on the menu a sandwich they call a Reuben sandwich, and it's a great sandwich with coleslaw and Russian dressing--but it's not a Reuben sandwich.

Game of Shadows is a cool Steampunk 007 movie. I'll buy Sherlock Holmes being an action hero, but he's not a spy--he's a private eye. And I'll buy into Mycroft Holmes being a gubmint official, but he's not a diplomat--he's a mathematician. The shaken-not-stirred character is cool, but not Sherlock Holmes.

It's someone else.

Just as Sherlock Holmes is not a Steampunk 007, Mycroft Holmes is not a Victorian M.

The considerable powers Mr. Fry brings to the role were significantly underused. When he played Jeeves to Hugh Laurie's Wooster, I saw the makings of an excellent Sherlock Holmes. The years and Mr. Fry's expanding waistline has made him into a perfect Mycroft, but he was used largely for comedic effect in this movie. He didn't really do anything significant--just like M does in your typical 007 movie.

I once had the occasion to know several cryptanalysts and cryptologic mathematicians. They manifested the very sort of smarts one would expect of the Holmes brother who went into mathematics. Sure, there's deep involvement in a nation's intelligence community, but it's an armchair sort of thing that you saw in the Tom Clancy stories where a roomful of analysts debate the significance of a radio intercept or a satellite photo--not the parkour-style chasing about that you'll see James Bond do.

I had altogether expect Mycroft to be heading the codebreaking effort against Moriarty's notebook, not Dr. Watson's lovely bride.

Other quibbles. Dr. Watson was mustered out of the military because of a war wound. In the canon he has delicate health, but in this movie he walks with a limp. A limp that goes away when he's dancing, or when he's running. Hmmmm.

Then there's Mycroft's nudism. It has comedic effect, but it's altogether gratuitous--unless you were wondering about Mr. Fry's middle-aged spread. Like wise Sherlock's aversion to horses? Where'd that come from? Arthur Conan Doyle had no problem making Sherlock an expert swordsman and boxer, why would he stint with horsemanship?

Moriarty is some kind of Lord of War (without the cocaine), and he's aiming to start a World War by sabotaging some kind of peace conference that reminds me a lot of a Star Trek episode.

Finally there's Rivendell on the Reichenbach falls. This is Rivendell.:

This is the Reichenbach Falls where Holmes and Moriarty have their final conflict:

 

Notice any difference?

I happened to like the Lord Of The Rings, 007 movies, Star Trek and the Wild Wild West, but I will never confuse them with Sherlock Holmes.

Why Mycroft?

When I sat down to write a Sherlock Holmes story, I wanted to do something counter-intuitive. So, I wrote The Aristotelian with a mind to stick to the canon, but upend everything I could. For instance, we admire Sherlock's detective prowess. Let's start with someone deprecating it! Thus, Sherlock's father introduces the notion that policemen are undesirable characters--necessary--but undesirable nonetheless. Everyone gets upset with Sherlock's cocaine use, but perhaps his habit is not out of control, and other things bother his family more. We know from the canon that Sherlock thinks his brother Mycroft is smarter than he is. We know Sherlock is disappointed by Mycroft's disinterest in detection. Perhaps his family could be disappointed by his interest therein.

Then there's Watson, faithful Watson. I figure he's a 100-watt mind who only seems dim in juxtapose with Sherlock's brilliance. Let's show Sherlock before he's reached the peak of his powers, but just as arrogant. Like any teenager.

But we read Sherlock Holmes stories to be dazzled by brilliant characters who solve puzzles that perplex us. Thus, I decided to include a locked-room murder in The Aristotelian.

I love smart characters and nominally write about folks smarter than myself. Thus I decided to not only put Mycroft in this story, but to write it from his point of view. Smart guys can be insufferable, so I decided to keep Mycroft uncomfortable and insecure in his detective role. He knows detection is Sherlock's turf, but he doesn't want the kid to show him up.

Probably the biggest reason for centering the story on Mycroft is his vocation as a mathematician and cryptanalyst. Since I studied both subjects I figured that I could write from that perspective with a geekish flair.

Mycroft presented some problems. In The Adventure of The Greek Interpreter, Sherlock claimed his brother was a competent detective, but he never says what gave him that impression. I wrote The Aristotelian story to show how Sherlock came to think so.

Sherlock also maintained that his brother has no ambition and no energy. I wondered how Mycroft might have created this impression. The easy explanation is that Mycroft is lazy.

In the spirit of turning everything upside down, I started work on a second Mycroft story to explain how Sherlock might come to think this. After writing several hundred words, I realized this story would not fit into a short story. Thus I decided to write Steamship To Kashmir.

You'll find the opening scene of Steamship To Kashmir at the end of The Aristotelian if you can't wait until this fall.

First Post

Welcome. This web site is intended to provide a launch pad for each of the stories of the Diogenes Club. If you're familiar with the canon of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, you'll recall that Sherlock Holmes told his friend Watson that the members of this club didn't do anything useful.

I think that Sherlock Holmes was able to eventually penetrate the secret of the Diogenes Club. But if he did, he didn't tell Watson. While most of the members of the Diogenes Club would feel right at home at P. D. Wodehouse's Drone's Club, a select few were occupied with exploits more technically demanding than Bertie Wooster's pranks.

I always thought most highly of Mycroft Holmes, but he only appeared in three stories of the canon. I'm aiming to remedy this. The first installment is "The Aristotelian" that consists of an explanation to the Duke of Denver (of Norfolkshire, not Colorado) of Mycroft's qualification for membership in the Diogenes Club.

The second installment is under construction. "Steamship to Kashmir" occurs seven years after "The Aristotelian" and it has another closed-room murder and an international manhunt.