1.18.2012

You Snooze, You Lose!

I posted an image of a draft of a cover for my second collection of short stories that will be released later this spring. The Silver Coast and Other Stories is a collection of reprints, along with a few newer stories, that were mostly written in 2010 and 2011.

Last night, I was looking at some reviews on BookReporter when, lo and behold, I saw this!

I was floored. I work with a very talented designer at the college. His business is called Canopy Studios. I'm not sure quite how many clients he works with, but he and I see each other all the time to talk about writing and design.

Zoe Sharp's title The Fifth Victim is being published in the United States by Pegasus. I asked my friend how it was possible that we'd both have the same image on the cover artwork.

"We've got access to similar resources, I suppose. What do you want to do?"

We can run that same cover. In fact, ours is actually a different image (it's a closer vantage point). We don't encounter any issues with legality if we just go with it (and the cover has changed some since I posted that link).

I felt kind of weird about it. I checked with my contacts at Distillations Press and they did, too. We're going back to the drawing board on the artwork. We'll take a fresh run at it.

But still, I was pretty stunned when I saw that cover. It's kind of cool seeing designers and publishers with limited resources (or at least I thought that was the case) playing with the big boys.

Oh, well. The key is to write good stories that can become entertaining books. I'll update the blog when I have a new draft and more information on a release for my second collection.

In the meantime, here's a look at the cover for a novella that will be released very soon. Distillations Press has novellas coming out from a number of different authors, in a number of different genres, with an eye toward publishing twelve of them in 2012. I've contributed the story Frozen and I'm working on the follow-up, whose title I'll write more about here when I get it approved.


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