Making A Cover for “On The Run”

I'm not sure who reads this blog (in contrast to the sister blog: Don't Wait for the Movie!), but I feel guilty about putting all the latest information about the Helen project on Smashwords over there.  In short, I'm publishing the entire Helen story in installments on Smashwords, which is essentially a self-publishing website.

Helen and Lalitha: The Lost Years was put up a couple of weeks ago.  It takes up the story after Helen gets back from ballet camp, (Helen at Ballet Camp), and describes how she meets Lalitha, an important, recurring character.  The book I'm working on now is Helen On the Run: The Lost Years 2, which describes how Erin joins the family, and little James is born.  In the first half of this story, Helen masquerades as a man, a construction worker.  In the second half, Helen is pregnant (well, she's pregnant pretty much the whole time).

When I made the cover, I first had a picture of a guy in a hard hat, and put it in a sort of Southwestern landscape.  But it looked rather dismal; I had put a lot of texture on it, because it looked so plain with just the picture of the gal in the hard hat.  Here is what it looked like at that point:

It is the head of a girl, and the body of a man, but I widened the hips, so that it looked more plausibly a pregnant woman.  But by the time I had finished with the texturing, it looked really gloomy.  People would have thought: she should jolly well be on the run, and she can stay on the run, for all we care!

But I thought we needed a softer image of a pregnant girl, so I added, behind the construction girl, a pregnant woman, lying on the ground.  It now looks like this:

I'm kind of proud of the lettering, which looks like a Wanted poster from the Old West.  Unfortunately, the pregnant woman looks like she's been amputated at the hips, which is really peculiar.  I guess more work is needed...

[To be continued ...]

Kay

What has been selling on Smashwords

I began publishing books on Smashwords last year, and so far I have published a total of 10 stories there (two of which were seasonal, and which I "unpublished".  They get put in the deep freeze, and I can thaw them out again as appropriate).

Out of these books, one is a complete, independent novel, Alexandra (328,000 words), three are short stories, Helen at Ballet Camp (48,000 words), Helen and the Flowershop Girl (less than 10,000 words), and Little John Finds a Friend (11,000 words).

Jane, 125,000 is a major part of another long story, which I put up for free, for no good reason, and it has been downloaded in its entirety almost 600 times (which I'm very pleased about, but of course, I have no idea whether anyone has actually read through it; that's the problem!), while Alexandra, which is the longest book I have published at Smashwords, has sold just 2 copies, at $5.99, which is on the high side.  At about 500 words a penny, it is probably not such a huge ripoff, and some of the words are pretty long!  Just kidding.

A stand-alone novella, to which I hope to write a sequel, is Prisoner (46,000 words).  I love this story very much, and I lavished a lot of care on it, and two copies have sold.  It isn't erotica, by any meaning of the word; the little sex there is in it is, I think, important to the plot.  I could probably take it out, but it would not be quite as powerful.

Then, there are two major episodes taken from Helen: Helen and Lalitha (74,000 words) and Sweet Hurricane (65,000 words), both of which are important chapters in the Helen story, but neither of them have sold a single copy!  So the story that is closest to my heart simply does not resonate with the readers.  Hurricane was the first story to get published, so there has been ample time for people to read the 40% sample.  Lalitha was published two weeks ago, and I suppose some of you are still laboring through the (enormous) 50% sample you can download for free.  I was tempted to just give it away, but in the end I priced it at $2.99, to find out whether anyone is actually reading it.  There have been eight downloads of samples, and we shall see how it goes!  No pressure, you all; please only buy it if you want to read it :)  I have a day job, and I'm comfortably off!!

My greatest loves are music, art and dance, which is why Helen is a musician, an artist, and a dancer.  A close runner-up is education, and Helen is a teacher as well, and a good one, unlike me!  I'm too impatient with kids who aren't interested; I understand that they're being forced to learn stuff they don't care about, but, well, you know, if you don't care, it is only a truly remarkable teacher who will go more than halfway with you.  But, the point is that the Helen story doesn't make sense to anyone uninterested in the world of classical music, so that is probably the biggest brake on the Helen series.

Well, thanks for enduring my rant, if you've read this far!  Happy reading!

Kay Hemlock Brown