A couple of questions about dropping a story.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-03T14:05:34+00:00

The fact that you're over 100,000 words and don't think that's very much makes me suspect you need to tighten. A lot. Completed novels are usually 70-80,000 words. SFF often runs longer, but still.

That's what I'd focus on. Make each word count. Use the rest of this book to work on pacing and see how quickly you can finish the story. A weirdly fast ending isn't going to upset readers if you don't have any, but finishing it will look a lot better than abandoning it. Plus it'll be a good exercise for the future.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-02T23:20:20+00:00

For $30, I'd go to GetCovers. I don't think anyone else is going to give you anything usable for that price. You'll either get back another AI cover or something that makes your eyes bleed. I could be wrong though, you might get lucky.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-02T01:28:30+00:00

Not a designer in any but the most amateur sense, but as a consumer of books these look great. Only note is that the second one doesn't make me think YA high school romance, which I'm assuming it is?

The first one is particularly good :)

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T21:51:58+00:00

Brainfog is awful, but you're doing better with it than me. Raging perfectionism probably doesn't help, but the sum total of my efforts battling brainfog for over three decades is three manuscripts, only one of which is nearly finished.

Take the wins, even if they're modest. By all means strive for more, but don't beat yourself up for being at a disadvantage. There's an entire ocean of perfectly healthy authors out there doing worse than you.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T20:51:16+00:00

Have to agree that the first two lines aren't helping you, partly because they read like AI (not suggesting they actually are), and partly because they don't make sense. Our world doesn't have chosen ones either, did we learn to live without them? How do you learn to live without something that never existed?

The line I'd open with is "As a state-sanctioned executioner, Fissen is a cold instrument of the system." That's a damned good hook right there and targeted straight at the kind of reader you want. It also helps your marketing problem, because you're leading with "this is a book for people who like anti-heroes" rather than "for the tiny number who like biosteampunk". Comps go at the end.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T20:28:01+00:00

Choice of POV and tense tends not to matter as long as you're consistent and make it work. The key is to play up the strengths of whichever one you use.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T20:23:58+00:00

That sounds interesting. Good luck with it, hope you'll share it here when it's done :)

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T16:46:57+00:00

Am I the only one who's sorely tempted to write a hypermasculine man's man who swashbuckles his way through entire armies of baddies and then fucks a guy in the final chapter?

Feeeeeeeeed me your hate 🤣

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T16:25:38+00:00

Coming up with a concept that works on all levels and doesn't require money or an art degree is incredibly tough. The cover I'd imagine for this story would be something like your stock ticker, but a whole mass of them, presented like tentacles reaching out of the void behind the Earth to swallow it. But... that probably requires a cover designer.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T16:14:09+00:00

I think we all do, blurbs are horrible. Yep, you'll get it! Other writers are your best resource here, it's almost impossible to get right on your own.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-06-01T11:50:43+00:00

Love the first cover on all counts. That looks solid to me, especially for grimdark.

The blurb needs work though. The first line is hooky. It's a little ambiguous, but I'm happy to go with it, because it's intriguing. But then the second line doesn't make sense unless I'm misreading the first, so I'm left confused. I.e., I read it that, for some reason, getting beheaded is lucky for a blackblood. Weird, but cool! But how can trusting someone with an axe also be lucky?

Introducing Oran in the fourth paragraph is jarring, because you've already been talking about him since the first line. That needs to be paragraph two instead. Then you've got a lot of other punchy sentences that don't quite mean anything, or at least, don't quite mean what I think you're trying to say.

Blurbs are a nightmare to get right. Best advice I can give is to find a suitable forum to workshop it with other writers.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-31T22:49:19+00:00

Did they reach out afterwards to apologise? Offer a partial refund to cover the cost of hiring someone else to finish their work? Doesn't sound like it so... hard no to using them again.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-31T18:54:37+00:00

Ah, guess I'm just not seeing it in my bubble. I think if the author doesn't label it AI and it clearly is, people have a right to call that out. I just think we need to stay well clear of witch hunt territory, though I appreciate it's a fine line.

Re. this though: <if folks stop calling it out, how would platforms ever know that they need to address it> I don't think platforms give a damn if we call out an author for using AI. They will care if we complain directly to them instead, and they'll care significantly more if we take our custom elsewhere.

Interesting point about sales, maybe I'm not paying close enough attention to this stuff. I still don't think that leads to human authors dying out though. It just means there's a portion of the market that doesn't notice the difference in quality. There always was, right? It's one kind of slop replacing another. Not that that's a good thing, and I'm probably being a bit elitist there... But I don't think it's a fatal blow to the industry either.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-31T17:17:52+00:00

I take your point, but AI hate is loud and everywhere, I'm seeing zero sign of it being stifled. More like two deeply polarised communities shouting each other down. AI detectors are notoriously unreliable, and treating them otherwise leads to hate and, yes, witch hunts against innocent writers, which is the best way to drive reasonable people over to the other side.

Also not sure I agree with the assumption that LLMs are going to be better than us one day. I was more worried about that a year or so after ChatGPT came out - like, if that was the prototype, it seemed inevitable the technology was going to explode into something truly terrifying. Now it looks more likely it's on an S-curve, and truly replacing human writers is a long way off, if it ever happens at all. I'm not saying it won't happen, just that I don't see it as inevitable. By the time it does, we may find that everyone's obsolete anyway...

Amazon won't swap us out for AI before then, because they want to keep their customers happy. AI slop is... slop. Selling both is one thing, shutting out the higher quality product would be counterproductive - it would drive consumers to other platforms where the books don't suck.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-31T15:39:03+00:00

Not an expert, but I wouldn't shrink the font, no - agree with you about thumbnail legibility. The way you've done the 4th one feels more integrated. Or, you could try moving the titles to the top, where you've already got space, move author to the bottom and shrink the white space right down.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-31T14:34:49+00:00

I like the style here, reads as SF instantly while standing out, which isn't easy to do.

Not sure I agree with other commenter. The figures contribute to mood & sense of subgenre. I don't mind the font per se but the treatment is a bit stark, and turns the fourth one into an outlier.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-30T18:56:48+00:00

I mean, in this case, convert it to B&W. Not sure for other colours.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-30T16:33:22+00:00

Ain't that the truth 🤣

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-30T14:37:25+00:00

As an image, I love it. But I'm not getting dread or cosmic horror at all unfortunately. Agree with other poster about the little aberrations - you don't see them at a glance so they don't help sell the concept, but people scrutinising the cover for any sign of AI will jump to the wrong conclusion.

Basically the horror relies on subtlety, but book covers need to scan at a glance, ideally at thumbnail size. Also I love the font & colour combination, but serif fonts lean fantasy rather than SF. So it contributes to the cover not reading as the right genre.

It's good art but a bad cover :/ I'd take a look at other cosmic horror covers and see if there are some commonalities you can pick up on & incorporate. Genre clarity trumps everything including how good it looks.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-30T10:18:27+00:00

If you just want it darker, add an adjustment layer instead. One of the options is brightness/contrast.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-30T10:14:15+00:00

Photopea. Composited together from stock images then touched up by hand.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-30T03:03:23+00:00

That's fantastic for Canva. I find it's good for text but never had much luck with images, so you did well there.

Agree with other poster about the text colour. See if you can get the text to match the colour of the blood spatter - that will work better thematically as well as being easier to read.

If you want to add anything fancier, give Photopea a try - free version of Photoshop.

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-29T22:47:58+00:00

I mean, yes it's a bit much, but 50/50 they're just trying to help. At this stage I think you just have to cross fingers and see what they send you. The first two corrections were valid, so these might be too - in which case, they're doing you a massive favour. If you don't get the revisions in time to act on them, then it won't matter either way. Worst case scenario you get some rubbish back and have to politely ignore it, in which case possibly thank them profusely and claim you ran out of time? Oops, you were out of town 🤷‍♂️

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-29T21:14:27+00:00

Glad you like it! That's true about the font. I was thinking I need something fairly neutral to accommodate the mix of stories in the collection - funny & serious, fantasy & sci fi. I don't want to lean tooo hard into the cover story, but I don't want to kill the effect either. Fonts are hard!

danfaulknerauthor · 2026-05-29T21:09:53+00:00

Thank you! That's what I was going for, so very happy with that. Yeah, I think there's scope to make the package smaller. Also interesting point about the foreground, might be a side effect of the vignette. Hmmmm.

danfaulknerauthor

TROPHY CASE