For complex reasons about 2 meters high I found myself needing to make a cover for a book I haven’t yet written and one which won’t be written for a while…

The book in question is the third Hannibal novel ‘A Squid on the Shoulder’ which is tentatively due to be written in earnest this spring/summer with a release planned sometime in the autumn. I say tentatively because writing takes a long time and I’m not one to rush anything to meet my self imposed dead lines. ‘Squid’ is sitting at 10k words right now as it has for a while, basically I needed a little break from having Hannibal in my ear, which was why I started writing ‘Maybe’ again in November, which is now finished bar all the final editing and will be coming out in April (the publisher made me say that last part)

Right now I am working on Maybe book two (its a trilogy, and unlike Hannibal which is going to end up about six books Maybe is going to remain a trilogy) The main reason I am working on Maybe 2, rather than Hannibal 3, is because there is a distinct difference between the Maybe books and the Hannibal ones. Maybe is written in 3rd person with multiple POV characters, Hannibal is… Well, distinctly Hannibal as he is the 1st person narrator of his own tale. So in order to keep my head firmly around Maybes style of story telling for the final edits I’m leaving Hannibal is kicking his heels a bit longer. Though he keeps nudging me with little bits of his story, so Squids plot notes keep growing like little tentacles of joy seeking there way out of the recesses of my mind….

This however left me, indie writer who does promotion on a budget, with a slight problem when I was designed a free standing banner for conventions. Which is one of those things you really need to have (so I am told). The problem being that I needed a banner that would last and wouldn’t ‘age’ as I basically don’t want to have to fork out for a new updated banner every time I release another book. And while sticking an A4 picture of a new book on to a banner with sellotape is a workable solution its a bit of a naff thing to do… Indie doesn’t mean unprofessional, and I hate doing things half-assed. So then, if I wanted a banner that I could use for a long time, it made sense to have all three Hannibal books of the first trilogy, on it. I will probably still invest in another banner at some point for all my other books, but for the moment at least Hannibal is very much my main series, and my presence as an author, so Hannibal is the series I want to put out there fount and center.

As such, I needed to make a cover for book 3… The book I haven’t written yet.

So this then is not a cover reveal as such, and the cover of book 3 may (and probably will) change to a degree before the book comes out but its a close approximation of what it will be, and what I want for that cover…

In other news though, having a banner for events make me a proper author, as apparently your not until you have a banner or so Harvey Duckman once told me…