#Giveaway Alert: THE PROSPECT OF MY ARRIVAL by Dwight Okita is free on Kindle Mon/Tues!

A new revised edition of The Prospect of My Arrivalby experimental novelist/poet Dwight Okita is free today on Kindle!

Here's my review from a few months ago:

My Christmas card to friends and readers: THE LATE GREAT SANTA CLAUS (Of course it's free!)

Seems like events of the past week have made this a very somber holiday. Joy and peace are precious natural resources. I hope your heart and home will be filled with both.

Please enjoy this little story about the moments in which we lose our innocence and unexpectedly find it again. I put it up free on Kindle this week as my Christmas card to all the friends, writers and readers who persistently restore my faith in human kindness.

Download The Late Great Santa Claus FREE all this week on Kindle.


Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone! 

BtO Co-Founder & NYT Bestseller Joni Rodgers Free on Kindle

I loved Boxing the Octopus co-founder and New York Times bestselling author Joni Rodger's brand new short book on the writing life. And best of all, First You Write: The Worst Way to Become an Almost Famous Author and the Best Advice I Got While Doing It is absolutely free on Kindle today.

Please download, enjoy, and share it with a friend today!

What does an author do with an ugly baby?

A few weeks ago, I put it out there to the universe: "Does this book cover suck?" The answer was a resounding "Yup."

Urg. The backstory on this book cover is fraught. Though I have a bit of graphic arts background and a lot of experience in book cover brainstorming, I didn't want to trust myself. I had it designed by a *real* designer. I hated the result, so I threw some good money after bad and had it redesigned. Then I decided to cut my losses and re-redesign it myself.

When I put all the covers side by side in front of a few trusted advisors (without telling them which ones were designed by me and which were the low-priced-and-you-get-what-you-pay-for *real* designers), they unanimously picked the two designed by me.

I went with the image of a dopler radar view of Hurricane Katrina in infrared technicolor splendor and launched the book with a not inexpensive ad campaign earlier this year. (Thanks for the birthday bucks, Mom! Wish I'd used the money to come visit you.)

Much to my dismay, the book just laid there.

It's painful (and not inexpensive) to realize that after years of gestation, one has given birth to an ugly baby. In the traditional publishing world, this would have been the death of the book, unless the publisher did a total overhaul for the paperback. And if it was an ugly paperback originally, game over. As an indie, I have the power to do something about it.

So I put the question out there, offering a free book to anyone who flipped me an email with a candid answer, and I got an interesting variety of responses.

About 25% said, "No, it doesn't suck! It's cool!" or some such. About 25% said, "The image is too swirly/ red/ confusing/ violent/ science-ish/ literal/ impersonal." About 50% said, "I like the image, but the title is too big/ too small/ should be more off-center/ should be more on-center/ lighter/ darker/ lower/ higher" or something to indicate something indefinably off about the font and/or copy.

Several people suggested a book cover has to have people on it, and the two of the four covers I'd originally had designed did have a pair of lovers in the clinch. More than one person looked at those and said, "I don't really like them, but you should probably use one because sex sells." (I don't think that holds true in literary fiction, by the way.)

Finally, one respondent hit the nail on the head. I knew the moment I read it that he was absolutely correct, as much as I hated to admit it. He said, "The masculine image doesn't go with your girly name. If it had said 'Tom Rodgers,' I'd have bought it."

Like it or not, there are deep gender biases inherent in publishing, and they stem directly from buyer behaviors that book buyers are not even aware of. I realized that the suggestion that it should be "more personal/ warmer/ less science-ish/ more... something else" actually meant "more feminine" so as to appeal to my audience, which is obviously not men, especially when my first name has that little clitoris over the i. (The in-house designer on one of my previous books told me I should always have my name in all caps, but at the time I didn't connect the dots, as it were.)

Book buyers (including me) do judge books by their covers, and there's an unspoken, mostly unconscious, but very real perception that men write books for readers, and women write books for women. That's bull, of course, but that's the perception, and anyone marketing books ignores it at their peril.

So I re-re-redesigned the book cover, and I'm re-releasing it this week. I've been assured by my trusted advisors that my baby is robustly beautiful now, and I took advantage of the reload to tweak a few typos missed by the copyeditor.  Like I said, you get what you pay for, and one of the big hurdles in indie pub is being able to afford the services we've always had provided by our publisher. (Not to say that the publisher's covers and copyediting are always great, because they can and do suck on a regular basis. This was not my first ugly baby. Just the first one for which I had to accept sole responsibility.)

From start to finish, it's been a learning experience, and I know my next novel will have a stronger launch because of it.

I hope this book will find a broad, varied audience. Frankly, all I've cared about since the beginning was what this baby was like on the inside. All that matters to me is getting this story into the hands of readers. The cover has to function as a welcoming doorway. So here's my best attempt at that.

Hopefully, the colors, movement and general vibe will indicate that it's about meteorological weather and about political climate. It's not a romance, but there's a love story and a lot of passion in all its iterations.

And it's free if you download it this week (Wed-Fri, 3/7-3/9) on Kindle. I hope you'll read and enjoy it.

Update: In less than 24 hours, The Hurricane Lover was in Amazon's top 20 overall, #1 on both literary fiction and suspense lists. Apparently, the new look is working!

Does this book cover suck? #TellMeTheTruth and get a free book!

Does this book cover suck?

Seriously. I need to know. So far I've gotten conflicting opinions from a variety of people whose opinions I respect.

What do you think? Email me at jonireaders{at}gmail.com, and I'll flip you the ebook free as a thank you! (Ignore the funky framey thing. The blog does that.) Yes, you get a free book even if you say it sucks. And no, the book does not suck. (I'm pretty sure.)


Here's what it's about:

During the record-smashing hurricane season of 2005, a deadly game of cat and mouse unfolds amidst polarized politics, high-strung Southern families and the worst disaster management goat screw in US history. 

As Hurricane Katrina howls toward the ill-prepared city of New Orleans, Dr. Corbin Thibodeaux, a Gulf Coast climatologist and storm risk specialist, struggles to preach the gospel of evacuation, weighed down by the fresh public memory of a spectacularly false alarm a year earlier. Meanwhile, Shay Hoovestahl, a puff piece reporter for the local news, stumbles on the story of con artist who uses chaos following major storms as cover for identity theft and murder. Laying a trap to expose the killer, Shay discovers that Corbin, her former lover, is unwittingly involved, and her plan goes horribly awry as the city's infrastructure crumbles...

You can read the first chapter here on Amazon.

The art of book cover design has fascinated me since I was a kid marveling through the stacks at the library. Check out this incredibly cool collection I spotted on the web site of branding designer David Airey. God pulled my name out of a hat when HarperCollins assigned Chip Kidd to design the cover for my memoir, Bald in the Land of Big Hair.

Really, I've been lucky with in-house designers throughout my traditional publishing career. Only one seriously fugly cover. I loved the gal who designed it so much, but... wow. Fugly. I was a wimpy liar and said I loved it, and then I had to live with that fugly cover for several years until the book went out of print. Meanwhile, the German cover was kinda cool. (Sheesh. Germans, right?)

They always bring in top talent for the celebs, so my ghostwriting projects always have great covers. The paperback design for Rue McClanahan's memoir, My First Five Husbands, knocked my socks off. (As did the late great Rue.) I always made a point of asking questions, listening in on conversations, learning how choices get made and why. That was my opportunity to get schooled by the best in the biz. 

As an indie publisher, I'm now responsible for my own covers. As with all other aspects of self-publishing, you have to either know enough to do it yourself or know enough to determine if the person you're paying is doing a good job. Good art/bad art is an entirely subjective matter, but there are certain fundamentals you can't get wrong.


The title must be clear and legible. That used to mean how it would reproduce in the newspaper; nowadays it means how it looks on a iPhone, Amazon widget or Facebook ad. Physical books come in all shapes and sizes; Kindles don't. A 4x6 ratio looks best on most ereaders, but you can cheat it a little wider if you want to show up larger on your Amazon page.

The imagery should evoke tone and content without being painfully obvious or literal. Or be obvious and literal in a way that reflects the obvious and literal tone of the book.

Think in thirds. A designer at a Big 6 publisher pinged a lightbulb over my head when he told me, "If a book is face out on a store shelf, the most likely place to be visible is the middle. If it's below eye level, the top third will be shadowed or obstructed. If it's displayed with a plate rail or shelf-talker, the bottom third is partially obscured."

We don't have to worry about that online, but the book-buying eye has been trained to look at books in thirds: middle first, top second, then the bottom.

Brand thyself. Because I moved from one publisher to another, my books were all designed by different people, so now that I'm gathering my backlist under my own wing, I'm thinking about how to make them look like a cohesive body of work. That's going to take some time and money, but it's important.

Which brings me to the big question: Does this book cover suck?

Seriously. I need to know.

#FreeKindleBook BT Sissel on THE VOLUNTEER and life before #birthcontrol

"Shannon was a class beauty. She was a homecoming queen nominee. But it was the Sixties; nice girls—class beauties, homecoming queens—didn’t get pregnant..."

In response to the recent political flap surrounding free access to birth control, author Barbara Taylor Sissel writes this timely post on her blog, relating some of the heart-wrenching stories she heard while researching her novel The Volunteer.

"Regardless of our beliefs on the issues of premarital sex and pregnancy," says Sissel, "silence is not the answer. Neither is judgment against or consignment to hell. That was life before birth control."

Sissel, who has a talent for putting issues into powerful context (a la Picoult and Shreve), is hoping to bring the message home, offering The Volunteer free on Kindle this weekend.

Get Your Free On: Spies, Lies and Innocent Deceptions!

Need some great, free weekend reading? Get Innocent Deceptions free for Kindle from Friday, Feb.10 through Sun. Feb. 12th. A historical romance written under my Gwyneth Atlee pseudonym, Innocent Deceptions is based on the fascinating true story of a Memphis belle turned Confederate spy who became engaged to multiple Union officers! Download your free copy of this Romantic Times 4 1/2 Star Top Pick and Multiple award nominee while you can and please don't forget to let your friends in one this sweet deal!

Hope you'll help me get the ball rolling with a quick download! Thanks!