By Grabthar’s Hammer!! Are you still visiting this site? I thought I’d let everyone know I’ve moved on to a new site! How did this oversight happen? How could you have missed it? How did things go so horribly wrong?!?
Probably my fault.
This site has been moved to StevenLyleJordan.blog. Please visit me there and catch up on what you’ve missed!
I’m taking the advice of a fellow author and trying out the services of Draft2Digital to sell my ebooks. I’ve chosen one book to try the service out—The Kestral Voyages: My Life, After Berserker. And I’m also going to experiment with a significantly lower price point, since my books weren’t selling at $4.99; My Life, After Berserker has been re-priced at $1.99. (Except at Amazon, which would not accept a price lower than $2.99.)
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In case any of you who have read the second and third stories in The Kestral Voyages, The Lens and The House of Jacquarelle: When I came across this ship design by artist Lewis Fischer, I knew I had discovered the look I was shooting for in the freighter Jovian Skies, piloted by Capt. Coray Gheris. Actually, this ship is probably about twice the size I envisioned for the Jovian, but the angular unibody construction and somewhat stubby frame is the kind of layout I had in mind.
Director 
Joss Whedon has a biography coming out (one of those things you look at with a strange crick in your neck, because biographies usually come out at the end of someone’s career), and in some excerpts printed in IO9, I’ve discovered some significant similarities in the way he and I see science fiction these days.
For instance, when he had the opportunity to submit a TV series concept to Fox, he wanted to do science fiction. Problem was, most TV SF turned him off. He wanted to see realism, but most sci-fi TV shows looked too plastic, too clean, like Star Trek. Or too cheap and cheesy, like Blake’s 7 or (pre-2000s) Doctor Who. One movie series he appreciated—Alien—but he wanted more than a “ripoff” of the Alien look. Continue reading
The Kestral Voyages: The House of Jacquarelle has been re-released, with revised text and a spanking hot new cover by yours truly! If you haven’t yet checked out the Kestral saga, now’s your chance to get all three novels, with their new cover treatments, and start your collection off right.
This is the first new design proposal for the third Kestral novel, The House of Jacquarelle. Any opinions out there?
I’ll be spending time on an editing pass through the novel before I re-release it, so there’s time to mess with this design, or try a few other variations. This design is similar to the first cover design, which featured Kestral and Mark O’Bannon in the literal crosshairs of an unknown assailant, and the Jacquarelle Mansion behind them. This time, I used my recently-discovered model for Kestral, a new building for the mansion, the new book layout, and a judicious use of Photoshop.
Do you think it works? Does it catch the eye? Does it look exciting… or cheesy? Let me know what you think.
My Life, After Berserker—the first incredible chapter of The Kestral Voyages—is now out in its new revision, with its new cover, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The other books in the Kestral series will soon follow.
Over the last few days I’ve been re-editing my first Kestral book, My Life, After Berserker. And as I did, I had to revisit two things I’d done in the book that honestly left me wondering:
What was I thinking? Continue reading
It can take forever for a designer (without his own studio) to find a model shot from the online image catalogs that perfectly represents the character he’s trying to depict. After much searching, I’ve finally found the model and pose perfectly suited to represent Captain Carolyn Kestral.
All of my covers are going to undergo a redesign for 2014, and my new design for the first Kestral novel will introduce a likeness that matches almost spot-on the woman I originally envisioned for ex-Ranger-turned-freighter-captain Carolyn Kestral. Sharp-eyed viewers may also notice that Kestral’s ship, the Mary, has undergone a new design treatment as well. All this, with the new cover design that the rest of my novels will get. The cover designs are still being finalized, but this is pretty close to the final design here.
The covers will be swapped into the ebooks for sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and (soon) Kobo Books. Hope you like them!
The novels of The Kestral Voyages are my most popular stories, hands down; not only my best sellers, but earning more comments, reviews and requests for more stories than any other novels I’ve written to date.
It’s not hard to guess why: When I created the series, it was originally based on the Star Trek universe, a story idea I intended to pitch to Paramount as the next Trek series after Voyager. Though I made changes to fit it into its own universe, it still has many similarities to the Trek universe that is still so popular with fans.
So, what happened? Well, it’s like this… Continue reading
