SPOILER ALERT!!!

Hi! I’m fantasy writer Peter V. Brett. You may be a new reader wandering around my website for the first time, fresh from reading The Warded Man. Or maybe you got linked here by some SF blog you like, or someone’s retweet, and have no idea who I am. That’s cool. I’m a pretty nice guy, and I hope we can be friends. But regardless of how it happened, if you’re new to my work, this is not the place you want to be.

Heck, even if you’re not that new.

If you’ve never read anything of mine and want a taste, why not check out the The Warded Man? That’s the first book in my Demon Cycle series, and even now, years later, I am still damn proud of it. And hey! Here are the first 50 pages for free!

If you’ve read The Warded Man and/or The Desert Spear, and want some fun, free bonus material, why not try going to my Excisions page? Lots of deleted scenes and fun stuff there.

But if you’re all in, if you’ve read The Warded Man, The Desert Spear, The Daylight War, and yes, even The Great Bazaar (there will be a test), then you might, just might, want to click here.

Just do me a favor, please. Two favors, actually.

1) If you want to link to this material, please direct your link here, to the Spoiler Alert post, and not direct to the material.

and

2) Please be respectful to those who have not read up through Daylight War. Please don’t post the spoilers you find in open feeds/forums without a spoiler alert/tag of your own. Some people don’t wanna know, and they’re entitled to that.

Thanks!

Posted on September 24, 2013 at 8:00 am by PeatB
Filed under Daylight War, Excisions, Fans, Skull Throne, Writing
38 Comments »

Posted by Peat

Huzzah! Starting tomorrow, The Daylight War mass market paperback (mmpb) will be available. You can order it online or pick up a copy at your local bookstore.

Posted on September 23, 2013 at 8:00 am by PeatB
Filed under Daylight War, Fans, Sales, The Daylight War
Comments Off on The Daylight War, Now in Paperback!

See part 1 of this 3 part post here.

See part 2 of this 3 part post here.

While all this was going on in the UK (see previous post), I met with Del Rey Books, my US publisher, to go over marketing plans for the new book. They told me a lot of things were being held back while they waited on the final cover. They asked if I would be willing to diverge from the UK covers if they assured consistency by asking Larry Rostant to do theirs, as well.

I pondered how a change in cover might affect the global marketing strategy for the book.

For about half a second. Then I realized I could have TWO Larry Rostant covers AND get to make suggestions for the image. Roll on!

I still wanted Inevera on the cover, but with one shift from the direction they were taking in the UK. That cover focuses on Inevera’s (not inconsiderable) martial abilities. In my mind, those are the least of her powers. Inevera’s true power is her ability to read the future with the alagai hora, her magic dice, and lay plans for confrontations years, even decades, in advance.

I pitched a cover with Inevera kneeling and casting the dice in darkness, just as she does in the book. I gave them a sense of the concept by showing a host of fan art like Margherita’s Damajah Cosplay, and Alex’s Daylight War Cover Contest Entry. You can see more with a simple google image search.

Del Rey loved the idea. Their art director, Dave Stevenson, sent me a list of questions, letting me have a lot of input in the process. Here are some of the notes I sent in:

The alagai hora are actually polyhedral dice, much like those used in D&D and other RPGs. They are black like polished onyx and covered in wards.

The character, Inevera, kneels on a pillow, shakes with two hands, casts them to the ground, then reads the pattern in order to foretell the future.

We could do something with the dice frozen in midair, like Matrix bullet time.

The clothes and veils should be VERY active. They are described often in the text as being translucent and wafting around her like smoke. Her long, thick black hair, however, should be oiled and bound in gold. She is too precise a person to let her hair run wild. Even the activeness of her clothes is a calculated thing.

Inevera’s magic requires darkness to function, so a black background is kind of essential. I was thinking it would kind of be the reverse of Desert Spear, with the background VERY black, and her clothes giving a bright flare of flowing color to grab the customer’s eye. The only light source should be the glowing wards on the dice.

There is some wiggle room with color. Bright color is consistent with the character and will be a stark contrast to the black background, but it can be muted somewhat. Inevera changes clothes all the time, so we could really do any color, so long as it is not black, white, or gray.

But if the dice are providing the only light source, then that provides the dramatic lighting up close for her hands/face and the colors of the clothes could get more muted the further they go from the light.

And, of course, the amazing result (click to enlarge):

This cover grabs the eye from across the room and dominates whatever bookshelf you put it on, but it’s power is much more personal to me. My buddy Myke Cole (who also has Rostant covers on his UK books) always says of Larry’s art that there’s nothing more amazing than creating a character in your head, and then meeting them face to face. I know exactly how he feels.

So that’s the story of how I ended up with two amazing Rostant covers for the same book.

Posted on September 22, 2013 at 8:00 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Daylight War, The Daylight War, Warded Art
3 Comments »

See part 1 of this 3 part post here.

If memory serves*, it all started in Melbourne, Australia during Worldcon 2010. I was having dinner with Emma Coode, my UK editor. People had been lining up (sometimes coming from great distance) to get their books signed and rave about them. It was my first real taste of enthusiastic readers in person, and kind of amazing.

*Note: Memory seldom serves. All conversations paraphrased.

We started talking excitedly about the next book, though I was still in the early stages of writing.

“The boys have done really well on the covers,” Emma said (you’ll have to add the British accent in your head), “but your books have so many wonderful female characters that we want to feature a woman on the cover of the next book.”

She said this as if I might want to debate the point. There is BS conventional marketing “wisdom” that books with women on the covers don’t sell as well as those featuring men, but I don’t buy that for a second.

“Shit, yeah!” I cried. “That’s a great idea. Who should we do? Leesha?”

“Well,” Emma said, “Leesha is certainly a lead character worthy of a cover, but visually, we think Renna would be a more exciting choice.”

“Agreed,” I said without hesitation. I had just commissioned a painting of Renna for my website, and was working on the Arlen & Renna portions of Daylight War at the time. I was all for featuring her on the cover.

Many months later, Emma sent me this Rostant painting, asking for my thoughts.

My first reaction was “Holy Wow! Yes!” The faded blackstem wards and the serious look on her face, the flare of magic in the background. It was an awesome image. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was doing—It looked like when the Hulk punches the ground to knock his enemies off their feet—but it looked cool as hell.

I wrote back saying that if they just ran with that image unchanged, I would sleep well at night, but if there was still time to tweak, Renna’s hair, described in the books as having been chopped off with her knife save for a single braid in the back, could be fixed. And her clothes were a little different.

I heard back some time later that the cover did not pass the full team meeting at Voyager, and they were planning to re-shoot. By this point, I was a lot further along in writing, and proposed that they consider Inevera for the cover instead. Daylight War was quickly shaping up to be Inevera’s book, and she has a distinct and exotic look, described in detail in the books.

Sometime later, I received Larry’s rough sketch:

Oooh, I thought, this could be good. I sent back some notes about hair, clothes, and jewelry, and of course noted that there are no swords in my books, so Inevera, not a fighter in any event, would certainly not have one. Larry went ahead with his full cover shoot, and a few weeks later, this arrived in my inbox:

Awesome, right? Another cover that could have been amazing. The model’s eyes grab hold of you and won’t let go. I wasn’t sure about the color at first, but it grew on me over time. I wrote back with a similar “This is great, here are some tweaks…” e-mail. My main concern was that the lower two-thirds of the image were a bit of a blur. Voyager agreed, switching to a different pose larry had sent:

Holy shit, I thought. Hell yes, let’s use that! But Voyager didn’t want to show too much of Inevera’s face, and there was a bit too much sexy going on at the hips to pass marketing muster. It evolved to this:

Lots of back and forth, right? Well we were just getting started. The above was exciting and awesome, but there were lots of spoons in the soup, and there was no consensus. It ended up going back to Larry for an unprecedented third photoshoot. The original model wasn’t available, so a new one was chosen:

This was the result:

Yow. Lot of power going on there. Especially the way she’s… breaking out of a giant block of ice? They changed the background to a more Demon Cycle-style fading light, and on my request tweaked the knife a bit, and added more translucency to the veil for the stunning final version that went on to debut at #3 on the London Times Bestseller list:

See part 3 of this 3 part post here.

Posted on September 21, 2013 at 8:00 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Daylight War, The Daylight War, Warded Art
1 Comment »

Posted by Peat

I like to think that I write pretty good books, but so do a lot of people. While my words may keep people turning pages and/or coming back for sequels, the thing most likely to get a new reader pick up a book in the first place is the cover. The cover is what makes the book stand out (or fail to) on a bookshelf, or table display, or computer screen. We tell our kids to never judge a book by its cover, but let’s be honest: we give our kids a lot of advice we don’t follow ourselves.

I owe much of my success to the good fortune of having been paired with the amazing photographic illustrator Larry Rostant for my cover art. For my first book, The Painted Man, this was just in the UK with my publisher Voyager, but the dramatic sales difference between that and the US counterpart (The Warded Man) led my US publisher, Del Rey Books (after some lobbying by me), to shift to the Rostant design as well. My agent recently did a blog post on SFSignal about this very thing.

You can judge for yourself if the switch was a good idea:

By the time my second book, The Desert Spear, came out, Larry was locked in for both markets and turned in a cover that to this day I hold up with no ego as one of the most compelling and powerful fantasy book covers I have ever seen:

So obviously the bar was high for the third book in the Demon Cycle, The Daylight War. So high, in fact, that designs went back and forth literally for YEARS, and even then, the cover was still being tweaked when the advance read copies (ARCs) were released:

What’s more, we ended up with two completely different (though equally spectacular) Rostant covers, one in the UK and one in the US:

How’s we get there? Well I’ll tell you. And you know what? I’ll throw in a crapload of incredible never-before-seen Rostant art in the process. Even though these images never made the final cut, they are all gorgeous and deserve to be enjoyed.

See part 2 of this 3 part post here.

See part 3 of this 3 part post here.

Posted on September 20, 2013 at 12:39 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Daylight War, Excisions, The Daylight War, Warded Art
1 Comment »