Morning, peeps and creeps. I hope you had a Happy New Year and enjoyed your Twelve Days of Xmas. Nothing quite so uplifting as taking down your tree and lights… not.

I refrained from posting my usual Christmas and New Years guff on this blog this time round, for various boring and uninspiring reasons. I’ve never been one of those people who looks forward to this time of year with relish, and between weeks of the most unrelenting grey and stormy weather, and a few other personal reasons, this one’s felt a little bleaker than most.

But with that tedious bullshit aside, I wanted to log on and present you with this:

And there we are. It’s not often I get to use the ‘Cover art’ tag on this blog, but I’m so happy that I’ve gotten to do it again. The team from Book Beaver have outdone themselves once again, working from my customary vague and indefinable brief to zero in on something that captures the themes and feel of the novel, while still being devastatingly simple.

The production side of things is going just as well – after a metric shit-tonne of revisions, formatting changes, and slipups, the paperback and eBook editions have been approved by KDP, thanks in no small part to the tireless patience of my copyeditor, John. Since there (almost certainly) won’t need to be any more revisions to either text or cover now, this means they should go live on February 1st. I’m waiting on a proof copy to come in the next week or so, which will be the final acid test of whether it’s gone from screen to paper seamlessly, but I’ll have plenty of time to make tweaks even then.

As part of editing the eBook version, I had to put it through KDP’s Previewer to see how it would look on a phone, tablet, or e-reader, which is always a surreal lens to look at your work through. See below for pictorial evidence.

There’s still more to do – I’ve the Goodreads page(s) to set up, as well as coming up with some actually good posts to market it in the runup to February 1st – but for now, I’m happy with it.

Now off you trot.