Ahhh . . . a three day weekend. I’m working on new, diverse book covers with Asian leading men and readying QUEENSREALM for release.

ETA: If you’re a self-pubbed author and you don’t know how to use Photoshop or Paint.net( free software), or Adobe elements, try to get someone to teach you. Stop by a local college art department and offer to pay someone to tutor you. It’s an investment that will save you money over the long run. Covers do matter, especially when faced with showing a heroine of color. The ability to manipulate an image to more closely resemble your book’s characters (if your female lead is brown in the book, then she should be close to that color on the cover. IR readers do notice and many are becoming quite vocal about seeing cover models with more variety in their skin tones and hair texture). The model below is actually a blending of two stock  images I bought:

I think its very important that minority writers not fall complacent enough to think we can’t stumble into “othering” another racial group, or fall into the trap of making our own culture the exotic. There was an interesting discussion on Dear Author regarding the use of food to describe minority characters, in a way that is sometimes different than the description of white characters. I’ve seen this in a number of books and some readers don’t care for it, so that’s something I keep in mind when writing.

I tend to use Saturday as the time to work on covers and promos. There are a number of scifi novellas I’d like to release this summer: