This is all because when designing the front cover of 'The Tyranny of Heav'n' using Microsoft's Paint3D software, let's just say... I got a bit carried away. Images can be imported, 3D items selected, assembled, rotated, brought closer and moved further away. There's a variety of paintbrushes, colours and textures at your fingertips, and tutorials explaining how to use them.
So having sketched out on paper an approximation of what I wanted for the book cover, I started playing with all the possibilities. Space. Robots. That sort of thing. The software had some ready-made examples, and sundry bits that could be assembled rather like an Airfix kit.
Ah, the background. We're looking for a landscape that could believably 'fit' for the surface of a comet, which is a giant ball of dirty ice and rock, flying through space. Then the idea came. We'd been to the Canadian Rockies a few years ago, and travelled up an ice glacier. I dug out the photos. This one seemed to fit.
Using Paint3D, I fiddled with the sky.
It still needed a bit of shadow and contrast adjustment, but we were getting there. I just needed to add the robot and give him a book.
All well and good, it's ready to upload on the Amazon Kindle author page.
But then I spotted the mistake. No, it's not in the title. (That's John Milton's spelling from Paradise Lost', a deliberate reference because the poem is part of the story.) And it's not to do with the idea of the robot having a physical book out there on a comet, when in the story he's actually reading the thing online. (The book's a deliberate incongruity.)
Something else is wrong with this cover, and the only way you'll spot it is by reading the free sample on the Amazon kindle page.
Like I said, the first person to spot it and tell me on Facebook, gets the Mars bar. I'd love to say it was deliberate, but it wasn't. Go on, then.
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Any requests of subjects for future posts? No idea too stupid for consideration. And yes, I know I am a bad writer, so don't bother saying that unless you can write something better. But maybe there's a topic buzzing around in your head that you'd like to see covered... because I've got a keyboard here, it's loaded with letters, and I ain't afraid to use it.