Covers Created in August

This month has been pretty busy from the cover creation and revamp point of view, and we've been keeping C.M. on her toes getting all these ready. Some of those below will have been released, and others are on the schedule for release. All are near completion, or in the editing and formatting stages.

E-book cover

Print-on-Demand Large Print

Print-on-Demand cover

E-book cover

Print-on-Demand Large Print Cover

Print-on-Demand Cover

E-book cover

New Release: Carlie Simonsen's Flying with Friends

Flying with Friends has been uploaded to the following platforms: Amazon-Kindle (.prc, print-on-demand), DriveThruFiction (PDF), Kobo (epub), OmniLit (.prc, PDF, html), Smashwords (.prc, html, epub, text, PDF, rtf, lrf, pdb), CreateSpace (print-on-demand). Those with links are available today, the rest will follow shortly.

Jack has been looking forward to the Christmas holidays. Not just because it is a break away from school, but because, this Christmas holidays, he is going to learn to fly. The only thing that mars his trip is the flash of blue he sees behind them on a remote dirt track. Why would someone be following them way out here? Is he seeing things?

Flying with Friends is the second book in the Wings chapter book series, set around a family with wings and bird-like feet.

New Cover: Carlie Simonsen's Flying with Friends

We are about to release the newest chapter book in Carlie Simonsen's Wings series: Flying with Friends. Here is the cover - Enjoy!

 

Jack has been looking forward to the Christmas holidays. Not just because it was a break away from school, but because, this Christmas holidays, he was going to learn to fly. The only thing that mars his trip is the flash of blue he sees behind them on a remote dirt track. Why would someone be following them way out here? Is he seeing things?

Flying with Friends is the second book in the Wings chapter book series, set around a family with wings and bird-like feet.

E-book cover

Print-on-Demand Cover

New Cover - Madeleine Torr's Country Rush

When Madeleine told us she wanted to alternate between two series, we weren't so sure, but she was determined, so we told her to give it a shot. Her next book out will be Country Rush, the first in her Bookstore Romances series, which center around the characters who work in, or pass through, Highway's Book Emporium, in a city very much like Melbourne.

E-book Cover

Print-on-Demand Cover

Print-on-Demand Large Print Cover

When Taylor helps a tall, dark stranger hide from men pursuing him, she embroils herself in the seedier side of city life. With her mother watching over her seriously injured father in hospital, Taylor has dropped out of university to help pay the bills, taking on a second job to do so. The last thing she needs is a rapid exit from the city and a quick trip to the country, but that's exactly what her tall-dark-and-handsome insists on. With a nasty criminal element on their heels, the pair of them take a fast train and a slow bus out of town, before fleeing to a country property to try to work out how to escape their dilemma.

Country Rush is scheduled for release to all platforms in mid-late September 2013.

New Cover - Stiletto's Luck by C.M. Simpson

Stiletto's Luck is the next short story to be included in C.M. Simpson's An Anthology of Blades. It's about an assassin dealing with the consequences of having a name more associated with a girl.

E-book cover

Print-on-Demand Large Print

Print-on-Demand

They could have called him Scimitar, Blade or Dagger, but, no, his parents had to call him Stiletto so Stiletto did the only thing he could. He learned to be the best at what he did, and he learned to walk tall - without the heels. When he finds himself in the center of a plot to assassinate the most powerful men in the city, Stiletto has only one question: How on earth is he going to walk out of this one?

Stiletto's Luck is scheduled for release in late August or early September 2013, and will be made available from Smashwords, Amazon-Kindle, Kobo, iTunes, OmniLit and DriveThruFiction. We'll let you know when it goes live.

Eleanor Maine - Worldbuilding with A Gargoyle for the Hotel Gothica

This was originally posted on 31 January 2013 on the regular Magic Thursday feature for the Dark Side Downunder blog. We asked Eleanor if she would mind repeating it here.

A Gargoyle for Hotel Gothica was my first ever romance. Until then, I had never written anything in the genre. Other genres, yes, but I couldn’t get my head around what made a romance novel work. It took me six months to learn enough of the genre basics to try writing for publication.

At first I couldn’t decide where to set my story, and then I saw, Dark Eden’s contest, Scottish Nocturnal. Stories for the contest had to feature a Scottish hero who was also a creature of the night. At the time, vampires and werewolves were very popular, as they are today, but neither inspired me as much as the idea of having a gargoyle hero.

I also wanted to write in a setting that I knew well enough to make authentic—and Scotland wasn’t it. I have cousins there, yes, and very distant relatives, but I’ve never walked the highlands or the streets of Glasgow and didn’t feel I could make them come alive for myself, let alone my readers.

I needed to set my story in Australia, in a place I knew the streets well enough to bring them to mind while writing, or accessible enough that I could go and explore them until the words painted them ‘just right’. I needed to set my story in Melbourne, with its hotel-mounted gargoyles, or Hobart, with its equally historic architecture.

During my research, I learned of the debate raging over selling one of Hobart’s oldest cathedrals because the diocese could no longer maintain it. Such a beautiful building, with all its gothic architecture, would form the perfect basis for a very special hotel. It was just the kind of gothic building traditionally protected by stone statues in the Old Country, and something a collector of gargoyles might treasure in this one.

I didn’t use that cathedral in particular, but chose to create a fictional building that had been built at around the same time, and which faced similar troubles. I decided this was the cathedral Claire bought and turned into a hotel, while doing her best to preserving its character and history. In this way the Hotel Gothica was born.

It was a nice basis, but it needed more. Who was my villain? Why was the gargoyle brought to the hotel anyway? And why was Claire, of all people, without a partner?

By answering these questions, I came up with the dissatisfied heir, who will do anything to get retrieve what he considers ‘his’ inheritance, and the treacherous ex-fiance, who broke Claire’s heart. By now I had a goodly portion of the story, but the mythology of Scotland is full of stories of elves—and not the nice cheerful ones that like to help Santa, or the mysterious-but-well-inclined elves of Tolkein. No. Scottish elves are nasty. I just had to have some appear in this tale.

I wrote, researched and wrote some more, fitting the pieces together and watching as A Gargoyle for the Hotel Gothica gradually took shape. More than that, by mapping out the different characters and describing their place in the world has given me a stack of notes and ideas that will form the basis for many more stories set in the Hotel Gothica universe. I foresee a future containing stories with more gargoyles and more elves… and many more nights in the Hotel Gothica.

Description: A Gargoyle for the Hotel Gothica

When Claire buys a gargoyle from a Scottish castle, she unwittingly buys the secret history that comes with it. A gift from the fae to the laird of the castle, four hundred years ago, the statue was a double-edge boon, until MacGregor gained control—and then his house fell. Where he went to is not Claire’s concern, although the handsome Duncan MacGregor who claims her gargoyle for himself, definitely is. And there are other complications. A statue with unsavory legends attached, might bring in the tourists, but when Claire rescues a woman from a winged attacker, she is forced to find out if the stories are true.

Blogging Elsewhere: Ellie Moonwater and Eleanor Maine talk world building using fact

Today Eleanor Maine and her counterpart Ellie Moonwater are over at the DarkSide DownUnder blog talking at the Magic Thursday edition about how they used facts from reality to build the worlds for their paranormal romances Hunters of the Nile, Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, and A Gargoyle for Hotel Gothica. They're also posting excerpts. Why don't you go on over and join them?

Blogging Elsewhere: Ellie Moonwater is over at the Four Seduced Muses blogging with an excerpt from her latest release Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat

Ellie has gone to visit the Four Seduced Muses and talk about Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, the first book in the Kitty Cordello Case Book series. She has even provided a hot (and not at all suitable for under-18s) extract for your entertainment. Why don't you go over and check it out?