Information about the Raven of Iskandar Series
Book 1 of Raven of Iskandar ‘Raven: The Call from Central’ will be available for 99 cents from October 15 through October 22.
This is to ‘celebrate’ the release of Book 7 ‘Outbreak’ and will give readers a way to jump into the series.
Actually, I would have run the promotion longer except that Amazon won’t let me.
Book 7 of Raven of Iskandar, Outbreak, is now available in paperback on Amazon.
I’m not sure if I’m going to go ahead and do the hardcover also. Costs are getting high. Although the benefit of the hardcover is that the corners won’t curl over like the paperback.
Book 8, tentatively titled ‘War’, is in the process of being written. Actually, the two ‘cliff-hangers’ from Book 7 have been resolved. More information about the events in the wider universe is coming out. Not sure how things will be resolved as of yet, but it’ll be fun.
The nearly endless editing has ceased and Book 7 of Raven of Iskandar, entitled ‘Outbreak’ is now ready for primetime. Kindle version is due to be released on October 1st. Paperback and Hardcover versions will be forthcoming. It takes a little more formatting to go to actual print.
Outbreak picks up where Deception Lost ends. The major event for the team is the All-star voting and the first All-star match on Christmas day.
However, the simple conspiracy against Iskandar now has far-reaching effects as the Chief is on the run. While the Iskandar organization would seem to have gained a couple of valuable allies, those allies now threaten to pull the purely sports-oriented commercial organization into a dangerous situation outside the borders of the Alliance.
Plots abound and, so far, no-one knows where the clones are coming from….
And in addition…
Yes, there will be a book 8. Book 7 ends with two cliffhangers and those develop to more than a simple fix. Book 8 will be entitled ‘War’, so that gives you some indication of what will happen.
Series Maintenance….
Somewhere along the line, Amazon has required even fiction to have a Table of Contents. I will be going back to some of the series to generate those. In the process, I had found that Book 1, only for Kindle, has the text for Book 6. Not sure how that happened, but I updated Book 1. If you bought the Kindle version and were confused, check it again, Amazon should have updated it to the right version.
First, right to the book cover, explanations below:
Just a quick note that Book 7 of Raven of Iskandar came back from the editor’s first round and I did pretty good this time. Most of the corrections occurred late in the book and during the exciting sections. One of the ironies was that my Scottish editor corrected my spelling from British versions back to American versions. There is a slight chance I’m being infected.
I’m not an artist and I’m not thrilled with paying multiple hundreds of dollars for ‘professional’ cover generated from their vast library of image elements. However, I’ve just gone through a week playing with AI image generators. Note that the book cover is the combination of three different AI generated elements.
I initially started with Microsoft’s Copilot. Mainly because it was free.
Copilot uses Dall-e 3 to generate images but the results were not great. First, if you use a long, specific description, it will ignore some of your elements. I tried generating a Raven picture and try as I could, I had a hard time getting it to show full body and then it insisted on high heels rather than boots.
If you started with a basic description, it was difficult to refine the image. It would give you options, usually two or three, and most would be the opposite of the direction you wanted to go. Finally, you’d get one to two tries to refine by text, then it would stop responding.
However, then I found OpenAI. First, they are one of the only AI image generators that allow you to demo the program without demanding a credit card number. And the results were much more lifelike than Copilot and you had endless possibilities for refinement. Oh, yeah, they got my money. Currently a sale is going on and you get one year at $6.00 per month for 5000 credits. They charge you a single credit for the initial image and then 1 credit for each refinement. When you do a refinement, you a selectable number of tries, usually 4. So you can chew up 10 to 20 credits an image. That works for me as I’ll only be doing images for book covers and the Raven website.
There are higher tiers of service for more money per month.
Here are a couple of images I’m working on. Note that with OpenAI (and not Copilot), you can upload an image and use the AI and editing tools to modify it.
First, a Raven picture:
I’m still working on the transparent background. Of course, I’m wondering how it will go with trying to create an image of Skylla.
Here’s a second image with the idea of Central City:
So, what do you think? You can leave a comment.
The writing for Book 7 of Raven of Iskandar has been completed. I’ve gone through the whole book twice to make sure the sequence of events works and doing the usual grammar and spelling corrections. Yesterday it was shipped to my editor (Yvonne Marrs). When she bleeds all over it, it’s blue so she must be royalty.
The usual procedure is that each of us goes through it three times. You’d be amazed what gets missed even with so many read-throughs.
Readers of the series will be surprised as the action has ramped up. Actually, I was surprised as I was writing it. Many writers will mention that they have a plot and scenes in mind, but the characters head off their own way. That happened here and in a big way.
In addition, there is a new short story about a character from the team. No spoilers and the name of the story is ‘Snow’.
Now I’m off to create a cover. Stay tuned.
Raven of Iskandar 
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