On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard

I was a bit scared of how it would turn out, but the end result was fabulous. Banks’ Against a Dark Background. I also put in an excerpt from a scene that showed the interactions between the two main characters, and provided a summary description of both of them and their clothes, again using pictures as references. Basically I described what format I wanted and the “feel” of what I was going for by showing the artist a few covers in genre with a predominantly red/orange background (I wanted red for obvious reasons) can’t remember everything I used, but one of them was Ian M. It’s a bit scary to commission an artist many thanks to Colin Tate, who gave me pointers for navigating the entire thing. I ended up commissioning Nhan Y Doan, whose work I had long admired, for a watercolour with the two main characters on it. I browsed a couple things on deviantart (seriously considered using a couple existing pieces, but one was too dark and the other one at a large horizontal format and therefore quite unsuitable for an ebook cover no matter which way I turned the problem). Cover art: I decided to get new cover art for the ebook version, to differentiate it from the paper one (which was a limited edition, and whose cover also had the slight problem of being far too busy to display at low resolutions, a definite handicap when dealing with buying ebooks). I figured that since the market for novellas was so freaking limited, I might as well dip my toes into the world of self-publishing and see what happened. Why: the original edition of On a Red Station, Drifting was a paper, limited edition hardcover with no ebook edition planned I got lots of requests for an ebook edition, especially from readers not in the UK.

What follows is a few disjointed thoughts on what I did and how I did it. So… I thought it might interest people to share my experience with epublishing my novella On a Red Station, Drifting.

On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard