HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY TO A FULLY PUBLISHED “ETERNITY’S IRYS”!
Printing with Amazon has been a mixed bag. I can’t exactly not use them due to cost effectiveness, but quality can vary wildly. The most common issue was the covers appearing off kilter in some what. The spines would be at an angle, the front would be off center and this was all made so much more obvious with the presence of the frames offering straight lines with which we could easily see the discrepancies.
So a thing happened wherein Rhett and I readdressed some of the obstacles that made the covers difficult to print consistently. Mainly the frame on the spine and, to a lesser extent, the frame on the front and back. My initial approach was to remove the one from the spine so no matter how “off” the printing was, there’d be no straight lines to make it obvious. After that, Rhett entertained the idea of removing the frames entirely to avoid ALL straight edges that might make misaligned printing obvious.
In extending the wing on “Fly Away” to account for the removed frames, we kind of slipped into an aesthetic shift. The darker, gloomier approach I’d hoped for from the start began to manifest. This resulted in a what was essentially a complete overhaul of “Fly Away”‘s cover.
Improved tools and greater experience lead to the masterpiece above. I am so pleased with the result. It hits all the notes I could ever want from a cover for my book.
But it didn’t stop there!
Immediately after, Rhett took on redoing “Two Minutes to Midnight” to match this new aesthetic.
AND I AM SCREAMING!
“Two Minutes to Midnight” now embodies EVERYTHING I could have ever wanted from it. Rhett’s absolutely STUNNING work absolutely gives my stories the gorgeous covers they deserve.
Anyway, this is now the trend for all covers going forward and I’m so excited.
Other News
The epilog for “Fly Away” has been somewhat extended and is at about the half way point of line art. We still don’t have a definitive release date, but I’m certain it’ll be sometime early next year.
First pass of edits are complete and now I have to sync the manuscript with Atticus to upload to Amazon for a fresh author copy featuring the new cover!
Time for the quarterly update where I remember I have a website I can post things on!
First, the site has received a lot of content in the Lore section. The Religion section has been updated with 4 out of the 6 sects of Sion’Dri, more Character Bios have been added, and a new section, Spheres, has been added to explain different groups within the Void.
“Places” is waiting on me to create some kind of map and “Languages” is waiting for me to figure out the two main Voidal languages and that is probably going to take some time.
More images have been added to the gallery and another “Comic” has been added to that section.
Second, the first draft of “Flyaway” is now complete! Once the cover is finished, the next step will be to work with Rhett on illustrating the epilog.
Flyaway Cover Progress!
It’s coming along amazingly!
The manuscript for “Flyaway” is markedly shorter than that of “Two Minutes to Midnight”, however, we will be more than making up for it with the graphic-novel style epilog.
Third, the Amazon retail edition of “Two Minutes to Midnight” has received some updates. Upon a recent read, I found some formatting and grammatical issues all of which have been fixed. Additionally, Rhett and I realized we did not publish “Two Minutes” with the correct cover. This has also been rectified. I was also uncertain if the QR code at the beginning was in violation of Amazon’s ToU so it has since been removed. The one at the end still works and is not in violation of any terms.
Fourth, we’re still looking into a new printer for bulk copies. I may give Amazon another try, but when 16 out of 20 copies come out like trash, it’s hard to trust them again, but the price point for bulk remains superior to alternatives. This obviously comes at the cost of quality.
Fifth, some stickers have been added to the Etsy page for merch. They are all made by myself with Rhett’s art and my Cricut.
That’s about it for now. It may not seem like much, but it is all HUGE in the progress of working on the story. “Flyaway” took a remarkable seven months to complete which is incredible to me considering “Two Minutes” took six YEARS.
As of right now, we are aiming for an early 2026 release. Please stay tuned as we continue making this series the best it can be!
As you may have seen on social media, the official cover for “Eternity’s Irys: Two Minutes to Midnight” is now complete.
But how did we get here? A lot of work and effort between myself and (mostly) my illustrator, Rhett (@firelocket).
But what does the progress look like? How far have we come? That’s what I want to archive with this post.
Let’s start from the very beginning.
1: The Proto-Cover (2018)
Behold! The proto cover I made at the very beginning of the project. Why is the tentacle green? What is the brown thing? (It’s an antler) What am I even looking at? All excellent questions that have since been rendered moot with the current iteration. However, this comes from a time when I wasn’t being fully honest with myself. Still love that background image though! Used to have it plastered everywhere on the original site.
Honestly, I cringe at this version. It comes from a very misguided point of view and the design is just… awful.
2: A Second Attempt (2019-2020)
Another monstrosity by me! Hand drew all that stuff besides the stock silhouette. It still has a soft spot in my heart.
3: The AI (2022)
So, this image was made with midjourney. To me, I saw it as the closest I’d ever come to a relevant cover. Obviously you can see a lot wrong with it, but further toying only made it worse so I clung to this pretty tightly for the longest time. It was the first time I could visualize the concept of a cover for the book I’d worked so long and hard on.
Text was added by myself.
4: The AI: Round 2 (2023)
My brother made this image with some AI program. It’s better than the one I made, but it’s still problematic due to its origin. Still, it became the baseline for the direction I wanted to take a real cover if ever I got the chance to make one.
It was also the first cover to ever be printed.
Text was added in post.
5: The Official First Draft
The first sketch by an actual illustrator! I was skeptical of the gold and purple motif even though it’s canon to the book, but we ended up sticking with it.
After we went over a bunch of book covers and how I felt about them as well as referencing that last AI image, this is where we ended up. This is true beginning of our journey.
As you can see, there’s also a little illustration that didn’t make it to the end. We decided to take additional artwork into the book.
6: Behold: A Frame!
Some more refinement and a more established direction. I’d fallen in love with Rhett’s impromptu spine design and, while it’s unconventional and might not be the best direction, I pushed it.
We were going to put the subtitle on the hour glass, but man did that not end up going well in the end. I like how we resolved it in the final draft.
You can also still see a scroll on the bottom. That’s where my name was going to go, but we ultimately scrapped the scroll idea entirely.
7: Shading!
We spent way too long trying to realize my idea of making the mask look crystalline. The burnishing effect on the screws and frame were actually a happy accident.
Also worth noting is the smoke now has a definitive form. This is very very important.
8: The Final Form!
TADA!
Still needs a blurb, but here it is! The final cover for “Eternity’s Irys: Two Minutes to Midnight”. This is what you’ll find on shelves, should it ever get to them.
I won’t lie, at first I found myself detaching from it. It was so hard for me to accept that this was it. This was the one thing I never thought I’d ever have no matter how much I wrote, no matter how much I edited, I would never have a cover. Especially not one actually created exactly how I wanted it to be.
I remember going on Fiverr. I remember shopping bulk production sites. I remember googling assets and considering doing it all myself to avoid publishing anything with AI. I was about to accept that AI cover, even though I didn’t want to, but in a last ditch attempt to do something I actually wanted to, I made a Facebook post. Rhett reached out and the rest is now history.
The more I look at it, the more I show it to others, the more I love it. The more I can come to accept that this is, in fact, my cover. What a wild concept I thought I could only dream of.
It is currently in the hands of my publisher (brother) and I should have a dummy copy in a few weeks. I can’t wait to hold it all over again.
Other Things of Note
Beta readers are about half way through and are making some fantastic critiques! We’re aiming for their pass to be completed by the end of the month. I’m implementing their suggestions as they pass them along. It’s been an excellent experience and another thing I never thought I’d have. I’m so grateful to them, I was dead set on being the only eyes to look at it before it hit the wild because I was too afraid of it being torn to pieces like a previous version had been. That would have ended me.
But that’s not how it’s gone. Not at all. And I’m crazy grateful for that.
October deadline seems to be holding strong. Once the beta read is done, I’ll finish polishing, see if they’d be willing to check it again. All that would remain is the internal illustrations and then… Well, maybe one more dummy print before it goes live.
After five years of drafting this thing and over twenty years of writing in general, I ended 2023 with a copy of my book.
Written in Google Docs with the aforementioned Royal Kludge keyboard, formatted in Atticus, “edited” with ProWritingAid, and print-formatted by my brother Paul, my unofficial “publisher”.
He had four of these pre-production copies printed and they are BEAUTIFUL!
I knew he’d been working on it as it was somewhat of a collaboration, but I was under the impression it’d be a while before I’d ever get to see it. Well, on the night of December 30th, sitting in his car the cold, dark, wet of Pittsburgh, he handed me a copy. Just out of the blue.
It took me a minute to process what it was I now held.
My book.
Eternity’s Irys.
I was holding it.
I never gave any thought to how this moment would play out as I had it locked away as a work of fiction in and of itself.
I broke down and cried. Sobbed, even. Ugly, happy, proud tears.
I’ve been in a state of awe ever since. The copy pictured, 1 of 4, is my editing copy as in the excitement a page got a bit torn. Three more still sit on the shelf beside my desk. One will go home with my brother. The other two will remain with me. I would offer them to some special people, but I’ve found some crazy typos just in the first chapter!
On that note, editing in the book has been AMAZING. I was struggling so hard with doing yet another pass on my screen, but putting pen to actual paper, BOUND paper, not just printed out on a laserjet, adds a level of realism to the process I’ve never felt before.
The copies themselves are hardcover with a dustcover, lined with purple paper, printed on satin pages, and includes a beautiful little purple bookmark. They’re perfect.
I intend to design a limited “Release Edition” once it’s all ironed out. As of right now, I’m editing the physical copy and the cover artist has a June 2024 deadline which we will be strongly targeting in the coming months. I have to work on obtaining rights for the embellishment image I’ve been using. As of right now it’s for personal use only and these are only personal copies. I’d like to clear it for printing. Finally, I’ll have to obtain IBNs for it and get it officially listed as a real book for real people to buy.
A mid-2024 release is VERY possible. Scarilly possible.
I am both nervous and excited, but mostly determined.
Happy New Years to everyone and I hope its everything we all need and deserve!
2024 is going to be a BIG year for Eternity’s Irys! Stay tuned!
Eternity's Irys 