Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Like this is the exact story that was meant to be put out into the world.
This is what I love about writing books. I had this little idea—which basically boils down to:
A magical woman on the verge of her happily-ever-after is sacrificed to a god by the man she loves.
And four months later I have this long, twisted, complicated story about four people and a little god looking for their destiny.
To say I am proud of Sparktopia is an understatement. It’s not perfect by any means—I think I could spend years improving this story and get it close to perfection. But it’s a futile thing, this pursuit of perfection. I am human, so I am proud to be imperfect.
I am proud of this work as well. I love the worlds, I love the characters, I love the premise, I love the mystery, I love the ‘gods’, and the train that slides along a split in dimensions.
And the cover. Oh, my god, I love the cover.
If you don’t already know this, I do ALL my own graphic design. Every cover, every teaser, all the videos and reels, all the headers in the ebook and paperback. I made about five covers for this book trying to get the image in my mind onto my Photoshop canvas. It took a long time but it was worth it. I absolutely adore the cover.
And the interior images of the paperback took months to pull together. In fact, I made at least thirty compositions for the interior paperback images. Not all of them made it into the book, but it was a massive undertaking. In fact, I just put the final images into my formatting program like 10 minutes ago and I’m sending it off to the printer tonight or tomorrow. I had an early, early copy printed up last year, but I replaced every single one of those images for new ones in the final edition.
I really love graphic design so I do it all myself. And I guess I should say something about AI image generation here because, obviously, I did not paint all these images. I used Midjourney.
I have very specific opinions about AI. But they are changing. It scares me sometimes how much they are changing. I have reservations about a LOT of it but I never had any reservations about making my own images.
I’m not stealing some graphic artist’s job because I’m the graphic artist. And to me, Midjourney—which I pay for—is a replacement for the royalty-free stock art website subscription I used to pay for. And it’s half the price for more personalized images.
Midjourney is a tool for me. And if people don’t like that, I don’t really care. I do things my way.
So regardless of what people think about AI, I’m using it for graphic design. And I’m not going to apologize for that any more than I would apologize for using Photoshop.
It took several THOUSAND iterations of images on Midjourney to come up with the assets to make the compositions that appear inside the paperback edition. Thousands of iterations.
The last time I looked I was up to nearly 22,000 generated images (the VAST majority were all for this ONE book). And MOST of them were total SHIT. Like 99% of them are unusable for various reasons.
It’s actually not that easy to use AI for graphic design, it’s an actual skill. I mean, every once in a while it will spit out an image that doesn’t need to be cut out and modified in Photoshop, but it’s a rare thing. All the compositions in this book were made from assets. Not a single image was made solely by AI.
With that said, I agree that AI is not good for humans. But the only way back now is the complete removal of the internet. I don’t see that happening. And if it does, our world has collapsed. It’s just that simple.
I know people are going to be asking about a hardcover version because all I’ve made is a paperback. I’m holding off on that for now but I do plan on having one. Probably it will be ready by the time the second book releases.
It’s August 3 right now and I’m a little over halfway through my current book—which is American Vampires #3—and then I’ll be starting the second Sacred Trinity trilogy.
But as soon as those are all done—I’d say November ’24—I will start this second book in the SPARKTOPIA world and I am aiming for a summer 2025 release.
Anyway, I am off track - back to the end of book shit…
I don’t think I’ve ever written a book where I loved every single character so much, I can’t pick a favorite. All four of these players bring something very special and unique to the plot and the whole thing falls apart if one was missing.