Stacia Kane

One week to the release of CITY OF GHOSTS, and I’m doing a big contest, so stay tuned for details!

Let’s clear some other things out of the way first. I have some really exciting news! We’ve sold Polish rights to the Megan Chase series to Amber Publishing, the same company putting out the Polish Downside books! Foreign translations are just the coolest thing, so I’m really thrilled about this!

And speaking of the Downside books, we have a couple of new UNHOLY MAGIC reviews!

Vampire Book Club gives it five stars and says:

With increased intensity, Kane delivers an action-packed, dark urban fantasy novel that will leave you reeling for days after finishing it. (We actually pre-ordered the third novel, City of Ghosts, the day after completion of Unholy Magic because we don’t want to waste even a day not knowing what will happen with Chess, her job, the love-triangle and the others within Downside.)

Smokin’ Hot Books also gives it five stars (to both books in one review, actually):

Unholy Ghosts and Unholy Magic are two of the best books I’ve read of 2010 and 2009. I’m not going to lie, the second book will tear your heart out, you may even find yourself emotionally ‘stress eating’ but so worth it. I promise! This series has grit, angst, violence, and pulls you in with each page – if you haven’t read this series, get thee to a bookstore post haste!

Vampire Book Club also has an interview with me, and a giveaway contest for both UNHOLY GHOSTS and UNHOLY MAGIC. So if you haven’t yet read them, there’s your chance!

There’s another interview with me, conducted by Daniela, a very sweet German blogger I chanced upon one day (she was blogging about GEISTERFLUT, the German edition of UNHOLY GHOSTS which will be released in Feb 2011, and I said hello, and it went on from there). Anyway, she asked me some kind of neat questions, and you can find it here. The interview is first in English, then in German; hee, look at my perfect German! And don’t you love that German cover? I can’t wait to see what they do with the other two! Obviously, the bangs aren’t there, ha, but who cares when it’s that pretty and atmospheric?

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(In honor of this I’m doing a little contest, details at the end.)

So…let’s hop in the time machine, shall we? All the way back to September of 2007. I’d sold the second romance novel I ever wrote (after extensive edits and cleaning up and all of that stuff), a medieval non-erotic romance called The Black Dragon, to an epublisher called Triskelion Publishing, which later went belly-up. Thankfully I’d gotten my rights back and sold them to Cerridwen Press, Ellora’s Cave’s non-erotic imprint, before that happened, but I’m going to talk about that a bit more near the end of the post.

The Black Dragon was a big deal to me. It was, at the time, my favorite thing I’d written, in large part because when I wrote it I was thinking of all those great “old-school” style romances I read as a kid. I wanted to do an homage to them, a sort of throwback type of story. So it was written in a specific voice and with, I hoped, a specific sort of feel. I was inordinately fond of the story, and still am, to be honest, because I think I managed to at least somewhat capture that feeling I remembered from those old-school romances.

And of course I wanted a cover that sort of reflected that feeling, but I knew Triskelion’s cover art was…well…not always great. So I asked for a fairly plain cover, a sword of a field of red silk, maybe with a dragon shadow over it? Or failing that the H/h on the parapets of a castle at sunset, which was kind of an important scene in the book.

Below is what I got. I literally burst into tears when I saw it. My lovely book, stuck with that. I emailed and begged for a different model, or pose, or something, anything, to no avail. I was so horrified that when I posted it on my blog, the only positive thing I could say was that I liked the font they used for the title. It was truly nightmarish.

Anyway. The other day some of my fellow Reluctant Adults and I were talking about covers, and some of the covers we’d had throughout our careers, and linking to them and showing them. I happened to toss in the cover triskelion gave The Black Dragon, and Mario Acevedo–that scamp!–mentioned how much better it might be if Mark Henry’s face was on it rather than the original model.

This is the original cover (Cerridwen, of course, gave it a new cover, which I adored, and will post at the end as well):

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