#sirois

[twobirdsflyingpub]

Sneak Preview: CRKT’s SIWI™by Sergeant Major Darrin Sirois Later this month I’ll introduce you to one of the best fixed blade designs, at any price point or country of origin, that I’ve had the opportunity to review, .

[georgesirois]

Cover Story

The Head & Shoulders campaign said it best: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” In any other case, this would definitely be true. However, in my case, that’s not quite how events have unfolded.

In the long and windy road that is the publication of “Excelsior,” I’m getting a THIRD chance to make a first impression, and I’m hoping that this third time is the true charm.

When I was putting the finishing touches on the first edition of the book back in 2010 (wow, it seems so long ago!), the realization hit me that I had to make a decision on the cover very soon. It had to fit the theme, it had to catch buyers’ attention, it couldn’t look amateurish and it couldn’t be too busy. That’s not so bad, right?

The problem was that I couldn’t decide on the type of image to use, and when Jason came by to spend a few hours working on a suitable cover design, we did a lot more brainstorming than I intended. By the time he left, we had something workable. Cheryl took a picture of my hand holding one of his art pens to a white page, and Jason took my original sketch drawing of Excelsior that I first drew in 1992 and gave it a true artist’s interpretation that I couldn’t give it.

We decided that a cool-looking cover would consist of my hand (as Matthew Peters’ hand) drawing an updated version of the character with a starfield coming out of the comic, implying that what was on the comic panel was spilling out into reality, which it was, in a way.

When I got my copies of the book and got to hold the finished version in my hands, I was satisfied with the cover, but I knew in my heart that it could have been better. Not to say that I wasn’t happy with Jason’s work on the cover because I was; it’s that we came to this idea simply because this was all we could come up with after a few hours of brainstorming.

Two years later, when I had the opportunity to go back into the eBook version of “Excelsior” and give it a much-needed revision, I thought this would be a great chance to take the cover design and enhance it to a point where it would stick out more to prospective buyers. Jason unfortunately wasn’t available this time around, due to work commitments, so I reached out to another friend – Ilya Arbit – who did a hell of a job on the revisions. He lowered the desk since it wasn’t important, he darkened the starfield to give the color some extra pop and most importantly, he added a really cool-looking starburst to the end of the sword Excelsior was holding. He also added in the “Top 50 Amazon Kindle Bestseller” text at the top (after its re-publishing, it went as high as #5 on one of their bestseller lists) and removed my middle initial. It’s hard enough to get people to remember George Sirois; no reason to confuse them even more by sticking a middle initial in there.

I thought that would be the last time I would need to worry about a new cover for this book… until I took the plunge and submitted the manuscript to Rocking Horse Publishing. By accepting me into their growing library, they gave me the green light to not only give the book one last round of edits, but to prepare a brand new cover for this new era for “Excelsior.”

This time around, I had more at my disposal. I had a very important prop that a friend loaned to me that I didn’t have while I was in New York. I had a background that allowed for a much more attractive texture. I had a concept that I considered back in 2010 that now seemed viable, and I had Cheryl who knew how to take that concept, make it look good on camera and then make it look great in Photoshop.

After seeing the most recent version of the final product – and I’m having some selected people look over it to make sure that it measures up to books currently in stores – I’m thrilled to report that I truly love how this cover looks. It’s a nod to the history of the character since the sketch that’s used is how Excelsior was originally designed back in 1992, and it’s proof that he’s gone beyond the simple black-and-white drawings I would fill my spiral notebooks with during high school and into the 3-dimensional world in which we all live.

I haven’t gotten the green light to show this new cover off yet, but trust me when I say it will be worth the wait!

[georgesirois]

A Second Life For Your Book (From the IBC Blog)

It has already been one year since Carolyn McCray (IBC co-founder) and I shared this conversation and it feels as though it were only yesterday. She had asked me what other stories I had on the horizon, and I mentioned two: the eventual sequel to Excelsior and my 2002 novel From Parts Unknown, which was with iUniverse and should have been formatted as an ebook months ago. She asked me about that 2002 book, and I told her how I accepted an offer from the POD publishers to have my novel turned into an eBook in March of 2010. All I had to do was purchase 25 copies of the paperback, and they would sell them to me at half-price and perform the conversion for free. Of course, this conversation with iUniverse took place almost a full year before I would join the IBC, so this sounded like a great deal for me. However, months passed and I grew less enchanted with the deal, especially when I discovered that From Parts Unknown would have a $9.99 price tag. I started re-reading my novel for the first time in years and, much to my chagrin, I didn’t like it anymore. However, I had some ideas on how to make the book much stronger. When I told all of this to Carolyn, she told me something that I would never forget... FIND OUT WHAT THAT ADVICE WAS BY GOING HERE!

[boyleingover]

Fireworks with Uncle Lynn, Aunt Ray, and Ella on Crosby Beach!