The Back Side of a Business Card

Businesses and medical offices are making use of the backs of business cards by posting additional information, such as appointment times, website links, or special offers.

I’ve decided to use mine to market both sides of my writerly personality — one on the front, one on the back:

These were designed using Vistaprint, and the images are the work of Suzan Troutt (dragon eye) and Jennifer Easter (stick-figure dragon).

Is there a fellow writer or artist or other creative person you trust and whose work you want to promote? Ask if they will split the printing costs and share a business card. It’s low-key marketing that immediately broadens your reach.

(all images copyrighted)

 

At Last!

After weeks and weeks of e-mail exchanges, instant messages, and phone calls, we finally have a cover for Dragon’s Rook. No more tweaking. No more design changes. This is it.

art & design c2014, Suzan Troutt; background photo c2014, Keanan Brand

Hat tip to Peter Stone, author of the Forager science fiction series, for suggesting we use leather for the background.

Suzan Troutt, the artist and designer, also designs business logos, and she’s trying her hand at necklaces, bracelets, and earrings. Check out her Etsy store, Urban Vampires.

Now, after I figure out how to make the Table of Contents link correctly and get the meta-data sorted, the novel will publish, first to Kindle then later in other formats, including paperback.

 

Revisions

For a few weeks, I’ve been “radio silent” except for a few forays on social media and occasional e-mail messages, keeping my head down and plowing through the final revisions for Dragon’s Rook.

Aside from a fantasy short story written earlier this summer, the revisions have been the most creative writing sessions I’ve experienced all year.

Brutally creative.

It’s as if light punched through the grimy windows of my imagination, and I saw the novel with more clarity than I had since its inception as a piece of flash fiction twenty years ago.

Scenes were removed, replaced, rearranged. The word count shrank by 22,500 words, more than enough to compose a novella or a modern version of A Christmas Carol. The story came alive.

By comparison, the past couple days have been a letdown. Now there’s “real work” — editing for clients, preparing back cover copy, writing acknowledgments.

What keeps me jazzed? The thought of soon seeing a completed cover for Dragon’s Rook.

Below is the artwork, depicting a dragon’s eye and the reflection of a tower — a rook, a prison, a fortress. A crumbling ruin. This painting is like poetry, condensing the essence of a complex story with big ideas and themes into a deceptively simple image.

If you’d like to read about the artist‘s process, visit Suzan Troutt’s post over at Penworthy Press (here and here).

Dragon eye, c2014, Suzan Troutt