New site design!

ByJohn Brown

Thanks to Rick Hellewell at CellarWeb, a web developer of many years with great skills and excellent rates, I have a new responsive website, which means it adjusts between desktop and mobile displays so the page looks great no matter how you visit. He fixed a number of other things, like my lack of indenting comments, as well as adding features on the back end. I’m so excited. I hope you enjoy the new look!

If you have any issues or suggestions, please let me know. And if you’re looking for help with a website, I recommend Mr. Rick without reservation. He’s been a pleasure to work with.

And now, back to Awful Intent.

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  • Awful Intent Cover Reveal

    ByJohn Brown

    For Awful Intent, I looked around at different cover design shops and decided to use Damonza. I sent over the brief, and we began. What I needed was a cover in the same style of Bad Penny. A match. I also told Grady, the designer, that if he did something new with Bad Penny, I might consider it.

    He sent back these.

    PennyB  Intent1

    Intent2  Intent3B

    I loved what he did with Bad Penny. But it was nowhere near what we’d done with the original. And none of the others matched either. And that was a problem. I need all of the covers in the series to look like siblings.

    We went back and forth with a number of iterations. Then decided to focus on Bad Penny.

    Penny2B  Penny6B

    Penny7  Penny8

    And then I realized that I was falling prey to shiny object syndrome. It’s the bane of my life. There were all sorts of great ways to approach the cover, but I had already spent hours sorting through all that with the Bad Penny original. And the cover must be doing okay, because we sold lots of copies last year. I decided for everyone’s sanity to stick with the original decisions and parameters. That meant:

    • Bold, action-thriller colors
    • High contrast
    • Big fonts
    • Some texture
    • And some small element over top

    But I was still having a hard time clarifying in my mind something that was eluding me. Luckily I was in Cedar City for the Shakespeare Festival at the time and having lunch with Dixon and Linda Leavitt. Dixon pointed out that I was waffling between a literal and symbolic approach. Once he said that, I could see exactly what he meant. For example, the Bad Penny in the first batch was painted on a board. It was more realistic. The red Awful Intent was more symbolic. He also pointed out that I had used a small element in the original. With that clarity, we went back to work.

    I’m very pleased with the finals (BTW, I’ll be tweaking the text above my name in Awful Intent; so that one isn’t final-final yet).

    BadPennyAwfulIntentFinal

    I think they say action thriller loud and clear and will easily stand out in a line-up.

     

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  • New series on writing coming next week

    ByJohn Brown

    I believe that there are three things you need to know to write stories. The better you know them, the better and more stories you’ll be able to write. Those three things are:

    1. What stories do, i.e. what you’re trying to do as an author.

    2. The principles of how character, setting, problem, plot, and text work to do those things.

    3. The principles of coming up with and developing stories.

    About this time last year I wrote my series on the key conditions for creating reader suspense, which went into depth on things 1 and 2. And I’ve written a bunch of other blogs on those topics. This year I’m going to be doing one on the key principles of getting and developing killer story ideas. I’ll be presenting it in a shortened form at this year’s League of Utah Writer’s roundup on Saturday (see my calendar for more details). One neat thing about this series is that I will have a number of other authors illustrate the principles with their own work. When learning this type of stuff, I don’t think we can’t get enough concrete examples. Keep your eyes open. I think it’s going to be a good one.

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  • Story updates

    ByJohn Brown

    A couple of updates.

    First, the narrator for Bad Penny contacted me today, told me how much he enjoyed narrating the book, that it’s in post production and the audio should be done next week. I can’t wait.

    Next, I’m progressing on The Drovers. Next scene up is a night time battle with a korrog. It’s going to be a blast.

    Finally, I just got out of my ankle boot for a surgery I had a few weeks ago. It’s time to go back to lifting weights. I’ve also read an interesting book called The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. I’ve been testing it out, and the results so far are positive. More on that later.

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  • Bad Penny is here!

    ByJohn Brown

    BadPennyEbookCoverBoom, baby! Today is thriller day.

    Frank’s an ex-con, trying to go straight. Then an old cell mate shows up and . . . let’s just say things go downhill from there. Throw in a Mormon, some drug lords, and a good helping of guns, and, man, was this book a blast to write!

    You might be interested to know that this story was inspired by a fine old brother in my church in Ohio who was one of those salt-of-the-earth folks who also happened to have been at one time a bank robber.

    When he got out of prison, he determined his life would change. He married a good Methodist girl he met at a church dance, went into the laundry business, and never looked back.

    It was my privilege to record his life history. Not a single event or detail in the book is about him. But I can tell you that his story deserves a book. Hopefully, my character Frank ends up doing as well in life as he did.

    The new release sale will run this week only. Same great prices as the last time.  Get ’em now while they’re hot.

    Bad Penny – eBook (Amazon)

    Bad Penny – Trade Paper (Amazon)

    Hey, John! What about iTunes, Nook, Kobo, etc?

    I’ve been working the last two weeks like a freaking elf from the North Pole trying to get these distribution channels set up, but the holidays seem to have stretched out the channel lead times.

    So here’s what you do: email me right now (click on my face in the sidebar) and tell me which platform you’re interested in. When the book goes live on that platform (and that should be soon), I will set it at the new release price and email you with the news. It’s that easy.

    See how good I am to you? (grin)

    A Holiday Side Note

    If you’re lying around on the 24th and don’t know what to do get the holiday spirit, please watch Merry Madagascar. It’s short, you’ll have a good time, and if you’re not already a King Julien fan, you will be.

    Have an awesome Christmas!

    Sincerely,

    John

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  • Curse Update

    ByJohn Brown

    CurseV2FinalV1A number of weeks ago life happened at my day job. I had just started a rewrite of the final battle of CURSE, but life put that on hold. Life got back to normal a few days ago. And a few days ago I began to work on that final battle sequence again. So you’ll notice that delivery targets have changed on the books page. I’m moving under a good head of steam now, and unless life happens again, we should meet those dates 🙂 More than anyone else, I want to get this book into your hands.

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