Well it occurs to me that I haven't been blogging in a loooooooooong time, so here's the scoop.

I'm about two inches away from deciding to Epublish Go Down Hard.  In the pursuit of that possibility, I've crowd-source a book cover at crowdSPRING.com.  For your viewing pleasure, here it is:

The space under my name is where my blurb from Michael Connelly will go, assuming I can figure out a way to get to him and persuade him to read the book.

CrowdSPRING is a pretty amazing place.  I had more than 100 entries from 25 or so designers.

I chose my favorites and then used their "focus group" function to have Facebook friends vote.  The function isn't great in that there is no way to corrolate the votes of people who voted for more than one.  For example, if someone gave 5 stars to their favorite, 4 stars to their second favorite, and 1 star to their least favorite, and someone else only voted for their one favorite, but gave it 3 stars because they didn't like it that much, I would have no way of ascertaining that.  They only give you stats on the total number of votes for each cover and the average number of stars it received.  Not helpful. I wish I knew how the votes fell out between men and women because I wanted to make sure my cover was not a turnoff for those women readers who enjoy noir.

Interestingly, when I got to my final focus group (I did it twice), I chose my three favorites without noticing who the artist was and they were all from the same person (I don't know if it's a man or woman, but I suspect he/she is from a foreign land as I was continually addressed in messages as "Sir."

Nonetheless, I highly recommend crowdSPRING to anyone who has any sort of creative project to put out to bid.  Their tech support communications, btw, are rapid and personalized.  I was impressed.

Let me know what you think of the cover.