Reminder - Sunday 13th April

My birthday celebrations, in the Pembury Tavern from around 5ish onwards. I confidently expect lots of people to be there, hopefully including you. Original invitation here.

Oh, and something I discovered yesterday - Richard Kadrey's novel Butcher Bird is available for free download. It's a well-written gore-filled story of a tattoo artist who gets dragged into a shadowy world of demons and monsters.

SF&F cover art

I've been wandering through a lot of discussions on the covers of SF&F books in the last few days - the old chestnut about "is this tacky or great?", "Will this put off new readers or will it keep the mundanes out of our genre?", and so on. I may work up a longer ramble on the subject, but I wanted to share my bogglement at one thing with you, O my readers.

Someone posted this image, showing the cover of his book, and asked for honest opinions.



Inexplicably, they didn't eviscerate him. There was not even any pointing and laughing. It's pretty good art, as fantasy art goes, but apparently that isn't a joke title or series name.