Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working to get all my Ernie Smith stories combined into one book. I’m still working on the blurb for this book, but these are the stories that will be in this book:
- Ernie Smith and the Seven Deadly Sins collection – 8 stories
- Never before seen Bonus Story – A Long Dragon Day
- 6 Flash Fiction previously published on my blog.
Editing these has been interesting. First and foremost of which is that I realised I’d dropped an entire scene in the published version of Finding Death’s Scythe – no clue how I missed that. It doesn’t break the story, but it means something had been lost in the overall flow of the series. I also went through and standardised the formatting to single quotations to match everything else I’ve been editing.
Once it was combined and edited, I just needed to create the cover and give it a new title!
Ernie Smith combined book title – The Life and Chaos of a Retired Old God
I got the idea for this cover by searching through google and amazon for style of humour books I liked and thought were inside my skill set for Affinity photo (not super high). What I found was quite of lot of covers were using the blue and yellow, so I wanted to make use of that, and they all had this funky kind of font.
So a few hours later I dragged myself back out of the google maze of fonts, photos and ideas and I created this cover, and a few other ideas, but this was the one I kept coming back to.
It’s still going to need a few tweaks, I’s sure, but it’s turned out way better, and came together a lot faster than I’d expected.
Along with the main new cover, I wanted to revamp the covers of the two stories I intend to leave as free online to lead people into the main collection. These covers also still need some work and fine-tuning, but I’m loving how they are coming together.
The plan is for Finding Death’s Scythe to be free on Amazon, and for In the Cards to be free only through the newsletter. (this is the opposite of what is up just now)
Both these stories will be inside the combined version, but it will give readers a chance to look at it and decide if they like my style before buying the whole book.
Now it’s just a waiting game for the physical proof copy of the book to arrive so I can review and prepare it to be published!
Let me know what you think of these covers in the comments!