STOP THE PRESSES!

Stop the presses!

Beyond delighted this week to receive this Beast endorsement from the great Laurie R. King:

When is beauty shaped by ugliness? When does a simple fairy tale give way to the dark textures beneath its surface? When Lisa Jensen takes it on, that’s when.  Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge is a love story, and so much more.

— Laurie R. King, New York Times bestselling author of The Beekeeper's Apprentice

My editor at Candlewick is so excited, they're going to redesign the dust jacket to fit the quote in.

Thanks, Laurie!

IT'S A BOOK!

And the hits keep coming!

So excited get my Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) for BEAST!
It's a book!

Or book-like, anyway. The actual print edition of Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, will be in hardcover, due July 10, 2018.

My lovely publicist at Candlewick Press is preparing a list of book-bloggers to send them to.

Let me know of you're interested!

Can't wait to share my Beast with the world!

COVER REVEAL!

Hey, folks!

For a while now, the artisan elves over at Candlewick Press have been hard at work on the cover art for Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge.

And now, at last, I get to share it with you!

Et, voila!

My story takes place in the French countryside, at the dawn of the 17th Century, more than 100 years before the tale we recognize now as Beauty and the Beast was written down in book form (first by Madame de Villeneuve in 1740, then retold by Madame de Beaumont in 1756).

My narrative imagines what the real story might have been behind the familiar fairy tale we all think we know. And the Gothic touches in this image evoke the dark, romantic mood of my story.

I've been extraordinarily lucky in all my cover designs. Just look at those three, cool Alias Hook covers over there to your right:  The US edition from Thomas Dunne Books, the audiobook from Blackstone, and the original UK edition from Snowbooks, a symphony in gold foil-on-black.

This beauteous Beast cover carries on that tradition!

I couldn't be more thrilled! What do you think?

TA-DA!

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have a drum roll please?

Presenting—the brand new cover for the US edition of Alias Hook!

Pretty cool, huh?

If you've been following my cover design saga, this is the ultimate reveal. The folks at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press have come up with this very graphic and mysterious original art concept to grace the hardcover edition due out July 8, 2014.

I'm so relieved it's not just a photograph of a model in period costume. Or worse yet, a headless bodice! (Eek!) This cover should stand out on a crowded bookshelf.

I like the subtlety of those male and female silhouettes. (That's a thicket of roses surrounding them, btw, a concept that looms large in the story.) I love the ship in the center and, of course, the second star on the right! And I couldn't be more thrilled that Laurie King's generous pull quote is featured front and center. (Thanks, Laurie!)

What's the deal with Captain Hook, anyway? Here's a little background on my novel,  and here's a history of the character in the 106 years since he made his debut on the London stage.

Alias Hook is available for pre-order, nationally, on Amazon, and locally from Bookshop Santa Cruz. It also has its own page on Indie Bound to match up readers with an independent bookseller near you.

And speaking of Bookshop Santa Cruz, I'll be there, reading from and signing copies of Alias Hook on Thursday, July 17, 7:30 pm. Get in line now! (Okay, just kidding, but I hope to see you there!)

JUDGING A BOOK...

Happy 2014 to all!

Out with the old year, and on with the show!

While we've been enjoying our holiday revels, the merry elves at Thomas Dunne Books are busily cooking away on the forthcoming US edition of Alias Hook.

While it would probably be illegal, immoral, and fattening to reveal the cool new cover art they've devised for the book at this early date, I can show you some of the sketches I sent in when they flattered me by asking if I had any cover ideas.

(As I told the brain trust at TDB, try to imagine these as rendered by a professional designer who actually knows what she's doing.)


This is my attempt at being graphic (above). That's a swatch of fairy dust curling across the sky, along with a Red Moon that figures prominently in the plot. At this point, there was talk of changing the title, so I didn't include any verbiage on this image.

I notice the actual TDB cover art is similar in color scheme to this sketch, except much more graphic and interesting!

And here's another idea I submitted, going for mood and narrative this time, instead of a clean design. I'm so partial to this one—I managed to sneak in a mermaid and a fairy!

And since my editor wants potential readers to know the book is female-friendly, I put my heroine's face on prominent display to suggest that the book is, in fact, a love story. In general, I'm not a fan of characters' faces plastered on the cover, for fear of interfering with the reader's imagination. (Unless the book is, you know, The Girl With the Pearl Earring.)

But, happily, the design team at TDB came up with a way to suggest a feminine presence in the cover design without resorting to a conventional portrait. How did they do it? Stay tuned.

Oh, those clever elves!

IT'S A (BOOK) WRAP

File this one under Way Cool!

My wonderful book designer over at Snowbooks, Anna Torborg, just sent me this e-file of the wraparound front and back cover of my new novel, Alias Hook.

In the publishing biz, they call this a "full flat." And, as Anna reminds me, on the finished book (at the printer's, as we speak), the yellow bits will be shiny gold foil and the white script letters will be embossed.

I've already rhapsodized over the front cover design. But this is my first look at the back cover—complete with jacket quotes, for which I bow down in extreme gratitude to my intrepid blurbists, Laurie King, Broos Campbell, and C. C. Humphreys. (Ed. note: you folks rock!)


Pub date is May 1 in the UK. But you can pre-order a copy for $US online at The Book Depository (with free shipping worldwide).

Color me stoked!

10 ROLLICKING YEARS WITH THE WITCH

Laurie King writes to say that "Pirates are the new Vampires" in pop culture. Does this mean I was 10 years ahead of my time?

This week, my pirate novel, The Witch From the Sea celebrates its tenth anniversary. Back in those pre-Captain Jack Sparrow days, pirate stories were considered strictly kid stuff, or else the province of capital-R Romance novels with brawny, half-naked rogues fondling their flintlocks splashed across the covers.

It must have seemed like a pretty radical idea, a grown-up historical adventure novel with pirates, told from a woman's perspective. My heroine, Tory Lightfoot, twice damned as a woman without family or prospects, and a runaway orphan of mixed white and Native American blood, joins a crew of pirates in 1823 to escape her constricted female life ashore. But I was fortunate enough to find an intrepid small publisher, Beagle Bay Books, who believed in my story and midwifed my novel into existence.

Speaking of covers, this was my original concept sketch for The Witch cover art. Pretty atmospheric, no? The full moon, the pirate vessel, a woman, um, evidently rising up out of the middle of the ocean like Esther Williams in one of those gigantic MGM aquatic musical numbers. Well, think of it as metaphor, just as the pirates in my book function as a metaphor for the freedom Tory craves.

I'm a little superstitious about rendering my character's faces; I don't want to interfere with the reader's imagination. But when I published a chapter out of The Witch as a short story in the pirate fanzine No Quarter Given, I drew this illustration to go with it.

It's a moment of psychological tension, wherein the pirates attempt to coerce information from the crew of a merchant vessel they've captured. That's Tory, on the left, looking apprehensive—until she (and the reader) realize what's really going on in this scene. (Oh, no, I'll never tell—you'll have to read the book!)

(Hmmm...looking at this image again, I wonder if it's too late to re-do The Witch as a graphic novel...)

But both of these images are vast improvements over my early attempt to collage together a cover, way back when my novel was titled Blesséd Providence (the name of the pirate ship in the tale). Talk about a bad case of TMI!

Notice how I tried to cram in every plot point: gold doubloons, pirate ship, Tarot cards (they figure in the plot and color Tory's view of the world), a map of the Indies, my protagonist's femaleness. Whew! I'm exhausted just looking at it now!

I'm too embarrassed to show you the very first cover I ever attempted, which also included a volume of Shakespeare and a Harlequin figure, in honor of my second protagonist, Jack, expatriate Englishman, acrobat, and failed Shakespearean actor-turned-pirate.

You can see how the Beagle Bay book cover turned out up there in the menu bar. The artist did a good job overall —I just love that burning ship! But I don't think he quite captured the spirit of Tory and Jack. Here's the detail:

Is it just me, or does Tory look about 12 years old in this image? (In the book, she's 18.) As for Jack, he must by the most neatly barbered buccaneer in the history of piracy. Just call him Metrosexual Jack, the Scourge of the Indies.