My Cover Designers 2 – Icy Sedgwick

As luck would have it, when one door closed, another one opened, in the form of the incredibly talented Icy – a lovely lady from the 10K Angels group. Unfortunately, I was extremely prolific during the Icy years, and rarely gave her enough notice, however she always came through with something fabulous.

The first cover was a prequel to the Hengist series, which I’d always envisioned writing at some point, and she created this truly unique cover using a photo I took of a yule log and matching with the concept of the parchment background and single object foreground. Senna’s story captured people’s imagination, and several readers wanted to know more of what happened before the start, so Nature’s tribe ended up being 4-books instead of the three I’d imagined.

Ultimately, Hengist expanded into a 13-book saga, with the final series, which culminated in the very 1st book I wrote featuring Archer and Rory as adults. Icy pulled out all the stops, designing some breath-taking covers for the Colour of Light series, probably my favourite ones ever.

Interspersed with these two were the YA books I wrote many years before Hengist, and the Bryant Rockwell covers are cleverly done with lots of symbolism in the colour and background to the roses.

Next I collected together a bunch of my very first short stories, weaving a narrative around them featuring and extremely sassy 30-something Lexie. These were way more adult – my version of 50 Shades of Gray, so I published them under my pseudonym, Ro Green. Also as Ro, I pubbed 3 juke-box Musical books, based on stories suggested by some of my favourite bands, Journey and City Boy.

The multi-talented Icy has many more strings to her bow (including a fabulous podcast), and I thoroughly recommend you check out her books here.

My Cover Designers 1 – Anthony and Rebecca

In my 16-year publishing journey, I’ve been privileged to work with some phenomenally talented people, and it’s time to give credit where credit’s due to the handful of artists who have paired my scribings with gorgeous front covers. And that’s not all – Anthony Askew, a friend of my son’s, designed my very own white horse – Blaise, used as a trademark symbol in all the Hengist books.

Back in 2009 when I looked into getting my first book published, I came across an outfit called AuthorHouse, and drove down to Milton Keynes for a presentation, which resulted in my signing up for a publishing package costing a humungous £675. Not my finest hour – suffice to say I learnt a very expensive lesson. Only good thing to come out of the publication of Subterfuge on 22 May 2009 was the cover. They took my mockup and made it look amazing.

Anthony Askew

The following year, I discovered I could create books with Lulu at no cost, and I’d taken some photos I wanted to user for the covers of the first 3 hengist books, so I got Anthony to turn them into covers. Unfortunately, I had little idea of the young adult market, and my daughter reckoned they looked more like the covers on text books. She was so right.

I did have fun getting a lad in my tutor group to come in and pose as Reagan at my kitchen table with a bunch of witchy artefacts. Turns out he was a proper drama brat (son of an actor) and he and Steph ended up in the school production of Dracula Spectacular. For the book tour of Archer and Rory, Anthony also created these fabulous posters, the third one of which resulted in the second set of (white) Hengist book covers.

And he also created the most amazing book trailer for Archer.
But then he set off on his travels so I needed to find someone new.

Rebecca Stirling

One of my author buddies put me in touch with the amazing Rebecca, and she created fabulous covers for my 1st two standalones as Ro Green, followed by the re-release of Subterfuge as Fox Among Wolves, which turned into a trilogy – due to reader demand!!!

Then she came up with a fabulous concept to re-brand the Hengist stories, which turned into 5-book series

And she also created the most amazing book trailer for New Kid in Town – the Bryant Rockwell first book. You’ll need to unmute it to hear the soundtrack.
Oh, and did I mention she’s also a brilliant author? Writing beautifully-crafted fantasy, (mostly shifters) as Keri Armstrong. Check out her books here.
Unfortunately, as often happens with us creative types, Rebecca took on too much, so she had to give up the cover designs, but I still count her among my friends – she’s the one who came up with my nickname JRo!

Thankfully, another fabulous female stepped in to fill the breech. More next week.

My Audiobook Adventures

This episode started a decade ago when I first looked into getting an audiobook for Archer. I listened to half a dozen different narrators, but none the voices were quite right. I even got a brilliant demo from a fabulous actor/director I used to work with at Marconi, but it was not to be.

Back in January this year, I got a message from a chap offering a sample of him and a talented female. They were very good but, yet again, the voices weren’t quite right.

Imagine my surprise when I was invited to take part in a beta trial of Amazon’s new “Virtual Voice” initiative. Having been very impressed with the narrators on Office 365’s Word program, I was more than prepared to give it a go.

Three weeks later, I’m nearly finished the second run through of Time and Time Again, and let me tell you, it’s been an adventure.

To be continued very soon …

My Instagram Adventures

This began back in January, when my fabulous daughter-in-law, Sophia, gave me a whirlwind introduction to the platform, transforming my unused account with a couple of posts and reels, and showing me a handful of tricks. In a little over two weeks, I had 8 posts, a couple of reels and a couple of dozen followers – pretty much all of whom I knew. Then the fun stuff started. My first scammer pretended to be some kind of spiritual guru, but turned out to be a teenage boy who basically just wanted money. For goodness sake. If he’d just approached me honestly and offered the sort of promotional services he reckoned he could provide, I’d have snapped his hand off. But nothing angers me more than scammers, because as a self published author, I’ve been targeted by these low-lives my entire writing career, over a decade.

On Sophia’s advice, I trawled through dozens of authors websites looking at the type of content they provided, and picked up a few tips along the way. Most of February was spent creating book trailers for each of the six books in my latest series, a genre mash up of time travel and dungeons and Dragons, set in a UK version of The Big Bang theory, with several nerdy 30 somethings. The first Time Doctors book, Time and Time Again, takes us on a journey back to the early 2020s reminding of some of the miseries in surviving a global plague. Lest we forget.

Because this is yet another brand new genre for me, I’m right back to scratch in terms of marketing, despite selling thousands in each of my mediaeval, magical and military series. And several hundreds more in my young adult and coming of age series. I’m not even going to talk about my very own 50 Shades series because basically I never promoted that one too much because it didn’t sit so well with the type of books I like to read.

Hence the foray into an entirely new type of marketing with all the frustrations and heartache of a (massively) steep learning curve. One of the more eye-catching tools for hooking in potential readers is the book trope graphic, so this was my next project. Apparently, they really work, because all of a sudden I’m getting half a dozen messages every day from “influencers.”

The first one I engaged with happily took my money (all $74 of it) to post a review which suddenly had 12.7k likes in a matter of hours, then not a single one since. She even had the brass neck to ask for a tip! All’s well that end’s well – with Paypal’s help, I got a full refund.

Mothering Sunday

Picking up from last week’s post, this is the sight I’m greeted with every morning when I return from my daily constitutional. You gotta love a narcissi.

In a few hours, my gorgeous daughter, Jo, is treating me to a meal at the Kings Arms in Mickleton in lieu of tomorrow’s celebration. Hopefully I’ll remember to take some pix and share them here.

Yesterday. My fabulous hubby, Brian, made a comment about the timing of this celebration, because the house is filled with my favourite flowers from our garden, namely daffodils and camelia. That’ll be where the missing vase went then!
I knew I had a spare vase on the kitchen windowsill, but when I went to put a few blooms in it to brighten Jo’s room it wasn’t there. Here’s me ranting about how I must be going crazy, hoping to prompt him into owning up he’d broken it, but he focussed really hard on the gadget he was fixing.
Some kind of detective I am – the clues were all there! Got there in the end, though.

His comment was off the back of my annual rant about how Mother’s day always falls on the shortest day of the year (literally only 23 hours long because they rob us of an hour), and it’s usually far too cold to sit outside.
Whereas Father’s day falls within a week of the longest day of the year and all the gang are pretty much guaranteed to turn up and share an al fresco meal. But not a barbie since we retired it due to lack of use!

I first noticed the disparity when I was heavily into pagan rituals, travelling down to Avebury every solstice to watch the sun rise and join in the celebrations with drumming, fire-poi and awesome ales from the Red Lion.
Many times, it fell on Father’s day and I’d have to do the rounds of my hubby, his father and my father before I could even think about driving down there. But I somehow managed it.

Nowadays, I’m happy just to raise a glass on the evening before and light a candle. You can pretty much guarantee I’m up at sunrise to go for a pee, so I always look East and fire off a blessing.

Spring has Sprung

We arrived at our Welsh caravan on 3rd March to open it up for the new season, to be greeted with the news the stream which runs a few dozen yards from our pitch had flooded, invading our next-door neighbour’s garden storage bin, rendering their lawnmower unusable.
Thankfully, ours was okay and we got everything set up in reasonable time, the major snag being the hole in the poo-bag wasting a precious half-hour searching for Sasha’s bowel-dump amid the thousands of poo-shaped/coloured mini pine cones. And the inevitable 3 times it took to reconnect the water hoses after the pressure had blown them off twice. And we won’t go into the gory details about my thumb getting trapped in the collapsible clothes dryer – just thank goodness I always bring ice for the 5pm G&T!

With below-freezing overnight temperatures, we had the gas fire and several electric radiators on all night – a first. We kinda missed the Shrove Tuesday pancakes, but because I had flour, I tried making some for Wednesday breakfast. Note to self: lard works so much better than butter/oil.
A mere fortnight later, the second jaunt couldn’t have been more different. We travelled down in record time – only 2hours/5 mins door-to-door (thanks to absence of loo-stop!) – and were unpacked and settled in after a swift half hour. Glorious!

The two walks around Machynlleth and Darowen hills were fabulous, and Thursday’s equinox brought with it 19°C and sunshine! I even managed to scrub down the two North/East-facing outside walls which the winter months always turn green. That’s half the job done.
Spring always brings out the best in Wales with several thousand hosts of golden daffodils, and best of all are the adorable newborn lambs – even the most curmudgeonly grouch couldn’t fail to be enchanted by their antics as they prance, leap and gambol around their ever-vigilant mothers. Proper little joybringers.

This is the farm on my favourite part of the walk around Darowen and, for most of the season, there’s a cute farm shop filled with the tastiest courgettes, garlic and a myriad of vegetables. Definitely a highlight of our stays in Wales.