We’re starting this series with Shannon Knight—she’s one of those authors who came to me from JCM Berne. I’ve yet to read any of her books, but she’s popping up on the blog all over. She’s contributed a Guest Post (as she mentions below) about the cover design for her novel, Grave Cold, and we’re working on something else now, too—stay tuned for that. But today we’re talking about the self-publishing, when she sent me her replies she explained why she replied to so few questions: “I wrote long answers to the questions. I guess I want to turn everything into a story.” I loved the her stories and thought they made a great launching point for this week.
Before we get into things, why don’t you give the reader a brief introduction to you and your work.
My name is Shannon Knight. I live in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve published three novels this year, all science fiction and fantasy. The first is Wish Givers, a fantasy set on a tropical island with tattoo magic where the hero must save her people and destroy her enemy by granting his every wish. Next is Insiders, a great, big space opera. With the help of a sentient plant, the crew of a small spaceship must each overcome their personal demons and lend their unique strengths in order to save the universe. Finally, I published Grave Cold, a biopunk novel set in the near future. When the dead are being used as an energy source, a reaper and a necromancer work together to save the dead from the living. You can find full blurbs for each book at your favorite online bookstore.
Buy Wish Givers here: https://books2read.com/WishGivers
Buy Insiders here: https://books2read.com/Insiders
Buy Grave Cold here: https://books2read.com/GraveCold
What made you decide that self-publishing was the direction you wanted to go? How often do you question that choice? How do you get through the self-doubt?
I caught COVID-19 in the Spring of 2020. None of it went the way I’d expected. I’d run a mountain marathon the month before, I had a robust immune system, and I was medically young. Nonetheless, it seemed I was going to die. Weeks passed, months passed, and I did not improve. In fact, new symptoms kept appearing, so that the random, extreme malfunctioning of my body became my norm. I strove to breathe, to haul my bones to the toilet, and to endure constant pain. In an allusion to The Princess Bride, COVID was my Dread Pirate Roberts. “Good night, Shannon. Good work. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”
During the first two and a half years, I had passing access to my own thoughts. See, even self-reflection was no longer readily accessible. In my moments of clarity, I accepted death. I accepted the life I had lived up to this point. I also really wished I’d put those books out. I decided that if the mental capacity to pull it off returned to me, I would self-publish. It was roughly around the two and a half year mark that my life changed. One of the many medical tests yielded results and a treatment. Suddenly, I could sit up. Out of bed. For many hours! My mind opened. I could think again! I started studying Korean. I could do it! I could simply stand up! I wanted to run. I wanted to build my body back up.
My new limitations clarified themselves, but I began work on self-publication. I could study Korean, but for some reason, I couldn’t understand my own novel. That was bad. My daily reserve of expendable energy was quite small. I minimized my steps, ate instant food, and focused on self-pub. I reached out to editors, to cover artists. I created spreadsheets of prices and timelines. Some of the waits were extensive. I worked as long as I coherently could each day, with my body wilting and vision blurring as I hit my cut-off point. Unfortunately, my symptoms were increasing, my functionality decreasing. It wasn’t long before I could only sit up for two hours per day. I emailed my doctor. He said, “Oh, yes. It’s common for this medication to fail. We’ll take you off of it for a reset. We can also keep doubling the doses as it successively fails. Each time, there’s a fifty-fifty chance these methods will work.” Confused, I emailed the artist and editor I had been planning with and put the project on hold. Off the meds, I returned to that no-person space.
On round two of the meds, I threw away all notions of exercise or cooking. Everything was about my books. I hired the editor. I confirmed that the artists would not be available before my next expected round of med failure. I had long pursued art as a hobby, but never anything digital. I decided to do the best with what I could accomplish myself in a race against my failing body. But I was improving! I was much more capable than during round one. I completed the Insiders revisions with ease, perfectly understanding my story, and feeling frustrated at the number of errors my copy editor had not caught. I gave the manuscript multiple extra sweeps myself to make sure I was satisfied with it. I published both Wish Givers and Insiders in January 2023. The green Insiders cover was completed in a deep blur of confusion as my capacity waned, but the book inside was everything I wanted. Back off the meds, I told myself, it’s okay now—you’ve got two books out.
Then my doctor said some very frustrating things to me. That guy. He said I should plan to never get better. That I should expect complete failure of the meds that let me think and stand and occasionally go to the grocery store. At first, I was upset, but then I decided that none of it was true. I’ve got Long COVID. It’s a novel disease. There are no treatments, they don’t fully understand the mechanisms behind it, and, therefore, they don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I have so many doctors, and only one of them made this statement.
I hired the artist that I wanted to do the Wish Givers cover. I found and hired an artist for the Insiders cover. It would be a few months. Was that okay? Would I make it? Hell, yes. (I paid early, though, just in case.) Grave Cold needed serious revisions. Also, it has a death theme, and I had lots of new thoughts on the matter. I dove into all of it. And I’m holding steady. WAY steady. I published Grave Cold in May. The artwork for Insiders was completed in early June, and the art for Wish Givers will be finished at the end of June. (I’m writing this in June.) Then I’ll re-release those books properly.
So why did I decide to self-publish? COVID-19 is why. Do I question that choice? No, I do not. Do I have self doubt? I doubt plenty of things in this world, but I do not question sending my stories out so that people can read them. Do you know what comforts a person who is lonely? What distracts a person from pain? What brings someone hope? What allows a person to consider the many emotions and relationships in this world when everything has fallen down around them? Stories do that. Stories are a light in the darkness. Let me turn on the light.
Do you do your own cover design, or have you found people to help with that? It seems almost as difficult as writing the novel itself—talk about the process a bit.
I designed my own. Cover design has been a unique challenge for each of my books. I spoke with you once before, in detail, about my cover creation process for Grave Cold. In some ways, the design for Grave Cold was the easiest of my three books because I chose the cover art from existing photographs. While I needed to consider many possibilities via different search terms and scrolling through endless photos, there were also built-in limitations regarding what was available. Then the details of the typography were chosen based on genre and on what the art didn’t already convey.
For Insiders and Wish Givers, I commissioned paintings. Therefore, I needed to decide everything. The price tag on commercial paintings also meant that I needed to make them count. I may not earn back the cost I spent on the covers, but in indie, if your cover isn’t good enough, readers are unlikely to even consider giving your story a chance. After the years I’d put into writing these books, the least I could do was invest in the best covers I could get.
Insiders created a distinct challenge. At first, I thought I had an easy solution because Insiders is a space opera, and NASA and ESA/Hubble have made all their space images free for public use. However, an image of space or spaceships in 
space would not drive home that Insiders is a character-driven, ensemble piece. Thematically, teamwork is crucial. I needed to show characters on the cover, but I couldn’t cram six characters and a plant on the cover and make it look good. (Or could I? I spent some time on that, too. I’ve seen movie posters do it well.) I considered which character or characters I could select from the group for the cover. One character has a special role in that she is a teen wearing the sentient plant suit, but a teen photo on the cover is code young adult, and Insiders is an adult novel. It took me longer than I care to admit before I realized that the plant suit covering her face and body, which would be straightforward in a painting, would eliminate the young adult classification and look wonderfully sci-fi. (Ironically, my cover artist, Isa Backhaus, chose to show her face anyway, but the result don’t look young adult in the painting. Of course, I also made this concern clear to my artist, so I’m sure it wasn’t accidental.) For Insiders, the final cover design also didn’t feature a scene directly from the book. Instead, the design was decided in order to portray enough elements to show the heart of the story. I believe the cover is beautiful, represents the story well, and will attract the right readers.
I spent months on designs for Wish Givers. It’s a fantasy novel, but my agent had found interest for it outside of standard fantasy circles, so initially, I was thinking of breaking the standard fantasy cover expectations by choosing an art style not normally used on fantasy novels. I’m afraid I spent too much time on that before realizing that my limitations as an indie writer meant that I shouldn’t be trying to break the mold. When I returned to the traditional fantasy style of covers, I realized I had a new problem. My Polynesian characters already wouldn’t look like traditional fantasy characters. The magic within the book involves elaborately drawn tattoos that make wishes happen. Showing a tattoo in progress or a completed tattoo would not convey a sense of magic or fantasy. I needed magic on the cover so that Wish Givers would be immediately identifiable as fantasy. I realized the wish that would best show this, but I was still worried about creating a design that was genuinely captivating. Plus the generative AI debacle was creating its own massive mess, reproducing the most common denominators of everything. I wanted something very human made. I decided one of the least common denominators was a truly dramatic perspective. And, eureka, I had it! I created a design for Wish Givers from an extreme angle above my character so that she was strikingly foreshortened. The angle alone causes the human eye to pause and reflect. It also offered the bonus of hiding many of the protagonist’s tattoos, which are story spoilers, and allowing for an eye-catching placement of the wish-come-to-life. After all my design work, I was amused and delighted to find that my cover artist, Eli Peiró, offered three designs to choose from, even if an author arrives with a design in hand. I could have saved myself some trouble and let her do that heavy lifting! I chose the design I had initially suggested. As I write this, the new cover for Wish Givers is being painted, the drafts are absolutely lovely, and the new cover will be available in early August. You should check it out!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your time and effort—and openness—for this. Thanks for your participation! Hope you enjoyed it! And do know that there are many of us out here who appreciate and applaud what you do (and our number is growing)!
Readers, be sure to check out all of Shannon Knight’s work!
Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
The 2023 Self-Published Authors Appreciation Week Logo was made by Witty and Sarcastic Book Club
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Wow!
HCNewton
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