For some inexplicable reason, a burst of energy and enthusiasm has exploded at the happy little cave that is Speculate (well, not so inexplicable, really… I think it’s because I paid my bill)  and the minions have been hard at work on my website.

They’ve been tweaking, and coding and muttering incomprehensible things in binary (can you do that, I wonder?), all to make my website a happy little place for me to waste time in, when I should be writing.

The big news is, of course, that now we’re now syndicated on Livejournal so if you’re that way inclined, you can add my blog to your friends page by simply clicking here.

We’ve also got heaps of new avatars/Livejournal icons for you to play with, a new quiz to test your knowledge on the Lion of Senet, and they’ve enabled the comments in the blog as a trial, so provided everyone remembers not to post spoilers, it should remain active, but we’ll wait and see.

The merry minions have also updated the two new covers that are out for the German release of Warrior (Ritter des Throns) and the new US cover for the upcoming release of Warrior. A very cute and handsome Damin Wolfblade features on the cover, although I don’t remember any scene in the book where he stands there waving his sword around in the hallway…

The whole thing about covers is a bit of a joke anyway. HarperCollins in Australia always goes through the motions of asking me what I think and then does whatever they feel like (I’ll tell you about my missing palm trees, some day). Nobody else even bothers to ask my opinion, generally, and more often than not, Amazon gets the covers before I do.

The upshot of this is that sometimes you get good ones and sometimes you get things like the Russian covers of the Demon Child Trilogy, which feature a fortune-teller on the cover of Medalon, a chick in a leather bikini with a unicorn on the cover of Treason Keep, and Harshini (my all time favourite) features a half-naked pole dancer swathed in nothing but some strategically placed chiffon.

Sex sells, baby…

Oh, I love ranting about awful covers!
I'm from Austria (part of the German book market), so I've been suffering a lot. They seldom use original art, but strip one fantasy book of its cover and place it on a different one and use for the stripped book a cover from another that has been stripped and ... - you get my meaning. Things like that have happened to Elizabeth Haydon, Robin Hobb, James Clemens etc. I don't understand why they do it, since those covers are usually quite distinctive and often play a similar role to blurbs.


At least your covers are original art (as far as I can judge), but they are so similar to Elizabeth Haydon's, that people draw inappropriate connections. I've heard more than one person say, that they won't buy your books, because they didn't like Haydon's - of course I tried to convince them otherwise, but it remains a problem.

For the record, your obsession with palm trees -- while understandable -- may not NECESSARILY be healthy. :P

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