Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Love's Pale Road Spotlight~Guest Post




Title: Love’s Pale Road
Author: Martin Gibbs
Series: Stand Alone
Genre: Fantasy/Romance (A Dark Love Story)
Publisher: Self Published
Release Date: July 27 2014
Edition/Formats Available In: eBook & Print
Tag Line: Love is a pale road, for Death waits at the end.

Blurb/Synopsis:
Beware the one who will betray you; for you have given them your heart.
Love is often a beast of convenience: two strangers meeting and connecting on some chemical and psychological level; sharing laughs and tears, and maybe bodily fluids.
But love can be real, when it wants to be. There are honest moments in the days we spend with our lover, there are days of sunshine and laugher, and nights of pleasure.
When it wants to be real. Love has its own designs, as poor Bailey finds out: Tasked by a dead man to perform a murderous act, he finds himself in love with a stranger. He was a simple-minded farmer, tending his turnips and his pumpkins, when the outside world burst in, sending everything he held dear to the far winds.
And so the poor chap is alone and scared when Abigail bares her pretty face. Although her family lies dead—somewhere on the path behind her—Bailey trips headfirst into the wants of his own heart, takes her hand, and carries her along a new road.
For Bailey, Love is more than a chemical reaction: It is a living thing, a living road… a pale road. A pale, murky, dangerous road.
For Death waits at the end.

Excerpt
But Sorchal was talking: “So if this is your farm, then you know the drill.” He looked at me funny again. “Gods help us, you better! Do you?”
“Do I what?” I was thinking about the Great Temple and it made me a little scared that people would attack it. It was a very holy place. But then Fa always said holy places were just places. The Gods were always with us. Why was Sorchal so angry?
Do you know the drill?” he screamed. He needed a nap.
The stranger’s face bunched up like the side of a rotting pumpkin. “Know the drill?”
“What drill?”
“Gods be—” his fists were white balls and he looked like he was going to hop away. He made a noise in his throat. “How long have you lived here?”
“Seventy-seven years, six months, four days, and nine hours.”
He snorted. “All right, you are useless. Who else is home?”
Useless. Yes. Good ol’ Bailey, useless as always. At least he didn’t say other bad words. I heard enough of those Friday night, when Fa and I went out for dinner. “Who else lives here?” he shouted.
“Fa does.”
The strange man’s head bounced like a rabbit. I think he was going to say something mean again, but he just ran to the house. He didn’t say thank you. Maybe he had come from the rock. A rock-person would be mean.

Book Links

Author Information
 Martin Gibbs lives in the snow-covered paradise of Minnesota, where he writes novels, short stories, and poetry. By day he is an IT professional, though his passion for writing has led him down an intricate network of exciting roads.
Gibbs is an avid reader. He favors the classics: Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Lovecraft; as well as Stephen King, Robert Jordan, George RR Martin.
He enjoys cross-country skiing, biking, and burning béarnaise sauce. He has two very active boys who share his wild imagination, and a wonderful wife who supports all the craziness.

Author Links
Blog Accessible Chaos 

Guest Post
Why Book Covers are So Important?

I remember browsing the shelves in a used bookstore: my head cocked to one side, I’d slide down the aisle, reading off the titles on the wrinkled spines of pulp fiction books. Mysteries, westerns, spy novels, etc.; if a title sounded good, I’d slip the book from the shelf, give it a sniff, and check out the cover.
Well, folks, the world has changed.
Things have become easier with Amazon recommendations—one can browse the virtual bookshelf, but you’re stuck with the covers. Which means authors/publishers need to be in tune with what is going to work. It also means that covers like this:


Can’t hold a candle to this:


(I know it’s the same book, but stay with me here.)

While I really miss the old days of sniffing books and browsing by title, I have to accept that everything is no longer as it was; and therefore just suck it up and deal. If I want a classic book, I’ve learned to ignore the covers—they don’t matter.
But for modern books—those traditionally published or self-published—I am resigned to the fact that the cover really makes a HUGE difference in what I’m going to look at.
Then we have another problem:
Self-published authors (I am one of them, even though I’m working with a traditional publisher on some stuff) have some pretty snappy covers. There are some really awesome cover artists out there (check out http://artbykarri.com), and they are putting out professional covers.
For readers who don’t care who publishes a book, this is great. For the big houses who are trying to hold onto the good old days, it’s a little scary.
This is not supposed to be a trad vs. selfie, so I will stop right there, and continue answering the question.
A cover is the door to your writing. Even if the writing is bad, and the story sucks, the cover still gets somebody to click on it.  That leads us down another path of ill fortune:
Eventually readers become numb. The quantity of quality covers is overwhelming, and everything starts to look like everything else. Sure, that’s the Big 6’s motto, which is pretty par for the course for most industries. Why put up a Shawarma stand when you can open a McDonald’s? Yet, this also has its benefits, for now the playing field is starting to level out. Oh, the big boys will scratch and claw and fight, you can be sure of that, but—
There I go down the wrong path again!
The cover.
The cover.
It’s everything. This is one thing I’m not sure you should do yourself, unless you’re an excellent graphics artist. OK, somebody’s going to call me on my self-made covers for my bizarro work. That stuff is supposed to look cheesy and photo-shopped. But if my bizarre covers looked like Paranormal Romance, it might just cause a rift in the space-time continuum (and you’d better hope you have Plutonium for the Flux Capacitor.)
All right, so all of this is a bit tongue-in-cheek and dodgy. I’m sorry. It’s a long-winded way to say, “Your work is gonna be judged by its cover, so make it right! Change it if you have to. Run it by readers. Have a few different versions (the biggies do this).”

I thank you very much for the opportunity to post!

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