Howard Carter: Cover reveal, release date, author photos!

If you follow me on social media, you already know this and I apologize for repeating myself. 

Howard Carter Saves the World has a cover and a release date!

The final edits are complete, the cover is locked, and we will finally get Howard's adventures in our hands on April 14th! The release will happen online simultaneously in the US and UK. I'll provide a preorder link as soon as there is one.

An ebook release is the initial plan, followed by a print edition if it sells well, so if you like reading about Howard Carter and his strange adventures, tell your friends because in order to write more, this one needs to do well.

The cover reveal:

Cover images care of Crooked Cat Publishing

The main illustration is one of mine. I might do a 'Cover Story' post about it at some point, but since I was illustrator, not designer on this one, I might not have all that much additional to say about it.

Author Photos, or Scott wasn't made for this modeling thing...

When my publisher was updating their website recently they didn't like how serious the photo I sent them was. It was taken by my wife, Kristin. It was all writerly, I'm sitting at the window of a cafe in Portland and staring out the window with literary gravitas... or so I imagined.

My publisher staged what he called "A social media intervention" and grabbed my profile photo from Twitter to use as a placeholder. It was a still taken from a webcam conversation where I was laughing rather a lot, so it was happy and looked like someone who wrote a sci fi farce you'd actually want to read. But it also pixelated like crazy.

Needless to say, they asked for a new picture. 

I was going to be spending part of Saturday in Tacoma anyway, and you couldn't ask for a better setting for author photos. Brick walls to lean against, walls to perch on, cafes in which to stare portentiously out the windows, staircases, park benches, fountains, sculptures to play with... 

The rules were: you have to be smiling and it has to work in black & white because people have Kindle paperwhites.  The rest was a matter of putzing around downtown Tacoma's cafes and museums with a camera.

My wife is an excellent photographer and I'm a terribly insecure model. I suck at being at ease in front of a lens, but she knows how to get the shot when I think she's pointing at something else. That's a rare talent, but she's a talented woman.

The nice thing about being married to your photographer is you get to keep the outtakes...

This is me remembering not to fall into the fountains behind The Museum of Glass.

This is me deciding Not to Fall Off of a Wall.

Save me!! Don't make me take any more pictures!!

Seriously, Tacoma's a great town, Thanks for playing host this weekend!

The results are in the new header for this blog, or you can see it on my official author's bio at Crooked Cat.