The second novel in the Newcomers series is Alien Talk, scheduled for release early in January, 2019. That means I have only a few weeks to have it all packaged up for the pre-announcement. I decided to reread it which inevitably led to re-writing, and I even added two thousand words, which meant I need a new paperback cover to accommodate the increased thickness of the book.
Since I was getting a new cover, I took a hard look at the existing one. I still liked it, but I had to admit it was abstract, obscure, and even misleading. I love the silvery ammonite shell because it embodies the Fibonacci series of numbers, which in the story was key to the discovery of the language alien. But realistically, that is an obscure reference and not even a key point in the story. The story is about language, not numbers. I had been delighted by my own delight.
Also, the old cover is abstract, arid, and devoid of tension, even though it is aesthetically well-balanced and attractive to my eye. It doesn’t tell a story, doesn’t make you want to open the cover. In contrast, the Reluctant Android cover is in-your-face colorful, and maybe a little weird too, but it immediately creates a mystery and a tension. Who is that guy? What is going on here?
The tentative cover for the third book in the series, Intelligent Things, also features a human face. People are interested in other people. If they see a face on the cover, they immediately react. Who is that? What is this about? So I decided that Alien Talk needed to have a human, or at least humanoid, face on the cover. And now it does.
I tried rearranging the colors to make Alien Talk as striking as Reluctant Android, but in the end it looked better in a more subdued, near-monochrome palette. Kind of the way language itself is so woven into the fabric of our lives that we hardly notice it. Maybe.
Anyway, that’s the new cover and it inspires me to get busy on the pre-release marketing of Alien Talk.
