Photography
Indie Author Services
I’m making very good inroads catching up with my emails, but still not all clear there. I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your loving and kind wishes, and I will get to each and every one of you. I’m not quite at warp zoom speed yet, but I’ll get there. I have to get stuck into earning an income from what I do straight away (to avoid the whole camping out under a tree thing), so I’ve had my head down for a while sorting out my website. I’m launching my services now at really low prices to begin with to get a feel for costing, and I’ll adjust them upwards a little later, so grabbing them now even if you only want them for later would be a fabulous idea. I’ve taken down my pre-made book covers page here, and replaced it with three new pages for Illustration, Indie Author Services, and Cover Design & Photography. I’m also going to put the link to my website in a widget in the sidebar here, but just click on the orange link in this paragraph for now if you’d like to have a look at it. While I’m totally confident that I’m good at what I do, I’ve never really charged for doing it before so this first step is quite terrifying, and any support with getting the word around will be very, very much appreciated.
Click on the links to get ideas of pricing, and if samples are needed that will be easily doable. Use the Contact Me form here or on the website if anything piques your interest. Here are a couple of my illustrations for those who don’t like a lot of clicking.
Baby Steps
Things have been a bit hectic for me for a couple of days, so no writing, editing, or indeed anything computer related has been done so far this week. Also it’s raining so my internet sucks. Life’s funny sometimes when you have to run as fast as you can and you still don’t keep up. Never mind. I’ve got thousands of emails and notifications again, so if there’s anything important that I should be doing that I could take a while getting to, please yell at me. Loud as you like. I don’t mind at all.
I have figured out that I’m a bit of a coward. I decided that seeing as how I would be forced out into the big wide world and have to stand in queues and do horribly tedious things for days, that I would take along my camera just in case I spotted anything interesting. Well. Just holding a camera in public gets you stared at, and also glared at if you look like you’re going to aim it in anyone’s general direction. Much respect to all you street photographers out there. I gave up on that pretty quickly after getting a couple of pretty boring and bad shots, and lots of resentful and possibly threatening stares. I’ll have another go though – when I’m not feeling pressurised to do other things, because I’m collecting elements for my future cover art project. I could maybe get into the whole glaring thing when I’m my normal self – it’s actually a little funny now that I’m happily back where I belong right here at my desk.
I’m quite excited with my cover design thing, and really hope that I get it right. I was telling a friend the other day that when I was a teenager I was obsessed with sketching pictures that told a story. They ended up looking quite “different”, and I was strongly encouraged to draw normal things instead. I remember doing one of Elvis entwined with tablets, a syringe, a pink Cadillac, and a peanut butter sandwich, so I can see where that was good advice at the time. But thinking back now I also see a frustrated cover designer – hopefully. I also remember writing a terrible song about a robot, but I’ll say no more about that. For the rest of this week I’m just going to be catching up with blogs and comments, and doing mini edits on my published books, correcting gremlins still lurking in them, and then changing their paper book formats and sizes, so WIP’s will only be got back into next week.
Diving into catch up mode now, and anyone contemplating prying me away from my desk for the foreseen future can anticipate worlds of pain. Worlds. Now – a couple of my furtive and wobbly shots on my first ever camera outing. I only had the zoom lens with me, and I’m pretty sure I had it on the wrong setting – so…
This huge cross lives on a hill overlooking our little town, and is lit up at night. Whether you’re religious or not, it is strangely comforting.
Taxi Rank
Brothers
Owie!
Birdies – of course.
Postal Postal Workers and Coming Covers
This district is still affected by the postal strike action, and seeing as how they are also my internet suppliers I’m still popping on and off line like the mad hatter all the time. I also haven’t been able to get hold of my actual mail since August. I’ll be heading to the post office again – ever hopeful – because I’ve totally run out of my paper books now, and that’s just plain bad. I’m expecting lots of other books and parcels too, so I’m more than willing to hop over the counter and find them all myself. Strikers pretending to be at work meet crazy scribbler lady – should be interesting.
One of the neighbours has been making an amazing racket, knocking a building down, rebuilding it, and now they’re having a borehole drilled. So between eyeballing all that, and my obsessive checking to see if the internet’s on, I’m not getting a lot of writing done. In the meantime, my awesome cover designer for my Shadow People series, Chris Graham, has been hard at work on the covers for the third and fourth in the series coming out early in 2015, so we will be doing a cover reveal for them tomorrow. Exciting times!
The heirloom tomatoes I planted for the cover of one of my books to be published this year have sprouted and all seem to be doing nicely. I’ve done most of the work for that cover so far, and the book itself is well along the road to being ready now. It’s the best job in the world, this indie trip. Now to see if I can clatter around the internet for a while before being booted out again. Spring has sprung here by the way, with lots of visitors in the garden to munch the fruit on the palms, and I’ve tried to get a picture or two. I’m still fairly clueless with my photography thing, and at this point I’m mainly getting images of departing little birdie bums, but I did get a couple I like a bit by accident, so pics for future covers are definitely going to happen.
Jo Robinson 