On September 17th, Matt Wallace is releasing Slingers: Savage Weapons, the final eBook installment in the five-part series about his team of futuristic gladiators and the beautiful and lethal world their sport has created.
What is Slingers?
“With the release of SLINGERS I’m trying to do two things: revive serialized storytelling in the grandest Golden Age of Pulp tradition while making it work in the realm of the digital, and introduce a model for author-published fiction that actually yields grown-up returns. Of course, that’s on top of all the other things I’m trying to accomplish with it creatively, like realize a multi-faceted, multi-layered character drama with elements of intense action, comedy, and romance, all of it set in the distant future against a global-cum-intergalactic gladiatorial team death sport and told in a crazy experimental narrative style that’s half stream of consciousness and half screenplay treatment. I don’t like to make things easy on myself, or anyone else.”
— Matt Wallace, author of SLINGERS
I’m very biased about this cover.
I admit it.
Designing the covers for Matt’s Slingers series has been a blast. His series features a diverse cast of characters from all walks of life, personality, sexual preference, and race. When we started designing the covers, we rapidly agreed to use a face and a wormhole-type motif and font, with the face and color of the cover changing from book to book.
One of the interesting things about doing cover designs with Matt is our planning emails. Raw and unfiltered, the interchange back and forth is exactly what you’d expect from us. I particularly like Matt’s descriptions of what he is looking for on the Slingers series, such as the below:
- Book One featuring Kem – man, face bruised and beat up.
- Book Two featuring Xenia – Female, latina, late twenties, tough but at least reasonably attractive, but NOT some 90 pound bitch. She’s a Judo gold medalist. She can whip some ass, and should look it.
- Book Three featuring Cuatro – Male, little person (dwarf), 30’s, doesn’t have to be handsome, but should look kinda mean at least.
- Book Four featuring Wade – Male, black, twenties, Terry Crews looking linebacker motherfucker, mean and thick as hell
- Book Five featuring Pondy – Some motherfucker who looks like you.
So why am I biased about the book 5 cover?
Well, as you can see above, the cover features my namesake character, Pondy.
Yes, one of the main characters featured in the series is a flash tech called Pondy. He’s a badass, the chief medical technician for the team, and he plays an integral role in the series… and he’s named after me.
Creating a cover with a character who is named after me and who is supposed to look like me (ish) is a daunting task. Do I go with an actual image of me? Do I go with an image of someone else and photoshop in characteristics of my own face? Do I go with a completely different face from my own?
Decisions decisions.
I struggled with this one, kids. First, in real life I’m not a bad ass. I don’t chew on nails. I don’t pummel people. I’ve never killed anyone (except those who deserved it, BAM!). In all, I’m a likable guy (for the most part).
So right out of the gate, I knew I didn’t want to feature my actual face… I just don’t have the look.
Conversely, I didn’t want to extensively photoshop a face with my features… it takes a long time and frankly the results are often not realistic or believable.
Instead, I chose to go with a face different from my own. In all, I spent a solid 2 hours searching through face on the normal stock-photo sites. Some were close to my overall features and some were a complete divergence from my gorgeous mug.
To be honest, I had just about given up on finding the “perfect” face and was close to deciding to settle on one of the “acceptable” ones.
But then I found this model:
This guy was just about perfect.
He’s a chrome dome (obviously), just like me.
He’s got a groovy goatee-thingie… just like me.
While the rest of his features really don’t look like me, there was something about his eyes that reminded me of me. Others may not see it, but I could see a little of my dad’s eyes in the guy (and my own, by extension), which was good enough for me.
All in all, this guy was pretty much spot on for how I pictured Pondy, minus the scaring that I’m pretty sure that Pondy has.
So I took this stock image, worked my magic with his bruising and scars and voila! Pondy was born.
If you haven’t checked out this serial yet, head on over to Matt’s site and try it out now.
Don’t have a Kindle? You can always pick up ebooks One, Two, Three, and Four by buying them directly from Matt. When you buy directly from the author, all the profits go directly to them, so whenever possible buy direct… and you pay a little less.
And, of course, the Slingers ebooks are available on AMAZON if you want to pay a little more and support the megacorps in their bid to take over the world.
If you haven’t checked out Matt Wallace, his blog or his works, check him out today. He’s one of my favorite authors; and that has nothing to do with me being biased about a client. Check out his site (to the left) or his author page on Amazon (to the right) below:
