Category Archives: Features

Cover Reveal

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Today we’re happy to bring you the covers for our next two titles, Wax, by Phil Duncan, and The Last Burning of New London, by Danielle Myers. Neither has been officially revealed, until now!

Coming October 2012

Wax
By Phil Duncan
Ages 10-15

Designer: Cory Freeman

Yancey Muncey is dead. Or, he was. Raised from the grave by the shadowy figure of Dr. Blankenship, Yancey is now back in high school, hanging out with his best friend, and working up the nerve to ask the girl of his dreams to the upcoming Halloween carnival.

But not everything is the same as it was before: Yancey’s eyes are yellow, his skin is blue, and he’s indestructible. As if that weren’t bad enough, Dr. Blankenship has made it his life’s mission to hunt Yancey down. Because the only reason Yancey is alive again is to help the good doctor destroy his rival.

An average boy with a new lease on an extraordinary life, Yancey must battle high-trained security and high school bullies in his quest to get back to normal. What’s the worst that can happen after all? He’s already dead.

Coming January 2013

The Last Burning of New London
By Danielle Myers
Ages 13+

Designer: Erin Clarkson

London Ruins is the head of a post-apocalyptic empire that spans across all theinhabitable land of Western Europe, and survives under the rule of Donovan, a reclusive, self-serving monarch. Donovan’s Royal Task Force carries out the assignment of eliminating all who oppose him by burning them alive within their houses. One group stands up against him, a legendary group of rebels called The Flames whose members are never seen, never heard, their actions only known after they have vanished.

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 Bloggers: Interested in receiving ARCs or being part of the blog tours for either of these books? Drop us a line at online@raintownpress.com.

Behind Visibility: Cory, the Mastermind

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Here we have an exclusive interview with the owner and head publisher of RainTown Press, Cory Freeman.

How did you discover Visibility?

The first time I saw Visibility was on a table for Bowler Hat Comics, a great Portland indie comic publisher, at Wordstock, Portland’s big literary festival. Bowler Hat was in the process of restructuring their organization, and the owner, Bo Johnson, knew about RainTown Press, and asked me if I was interested in taking over the management of Visibility. We were just wrapping up production on our first book, Spartacus and the Circus of Shadows, and were looking for a second book to add to our list of titles. Since our focus is on middle grade and young adult literature, it seemed like a natural fit for our press. The themes of the book were also intriguing. I mean, what’s not cool about a teenage girl with super powers? It was kind of an easy decision. 

With this publication of Visibility, what changes did you make? 

The physical book, designed by Bowler Hat Comics, is very cool looking, and the illustrations are well done. It’s sort of a hybrid between a traditional novel and a graphic novel. However, since we already have the remainder of the originals (which are available on our website, by the way), we decided to take a whole new approach with our electronic  version. We felt the story was strong enough to stand on its own, without the illustrations. We gave it a more modern cover, more in line with what you might see on bookshelves today.

The physical book is still a great companion piece to the electronic version. We even have a few left in stock that are autographed by the author, in case people are interested in that aspect of owning a physical book. As a promotion, I would like to extend an offer to readers: present us with proof that you purchased the e-book of Visibility, and we’ll send a copy of the original book for just $5 plus shipping ($8 total).

What a bargain! So tell us, what other books can we expect from RainTown this year?

We’re very excited about the books we have coming out. In October we have Wax, by Phil Duncan, which is sort of a middle-grade Frankenstein story (don’t call him a zombie, he hates that). Then in January we have Danielle Myers’ futuristic stand-alone, The Last Burning of New London, which is about a gang of rebels trying to bring down a corrupt government.

In Spring we’ll be bringing you Artemis Dreamt, by Crystal Beran, which is a contemporary novel with a hint of magical realism. And finally, next Summer will see the release of Devil’s Fire, by Kiersi Burkhart, the first in a YA paranormal trilogy. After that, well, I’m not at liberty to say…yet.

Sounds intriguing!

Now for something a little different…Growing up, who was your favorite super hero, and why?

Well, I don’t want to age myself here, but when I first made the transition from reading Huey, Dewey & Louie (as well as the Archie comics), the next series of comics I got into were The Fantastic Four. I loved the idea of a group of superheroes, and  Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, Thing, and the Human Torch satisfied that need. My favorites of the bunch were the Human Torch, and Thing; probably more so because of the sheer raw power of the character. He as just this massive, powerful hulk of rock. I thought that was cool.

If you could be a super villain, what would your master plan be?

I would be an altruistic anti super villain. I would take down corrupt governments and organizations. On the surface, I would appear to be the bad guy to the people I was trying to take down, but my ultimate mission would be to make the world a better place
Reminds me of a certain Horrible villian and a certain sing-along blog…

So, what super power would you have?

I’ve thought about this a million times since I was a kid. I have a Top Three:

1) I would have the ability to become invisible so I could be unseen in any environment or situation (maybe this is why Visibility spoke to me).

2) I would be fluent in every language so I could travel anywhere, fit in with the people, and be able to infiltrate any evil group.

3) I would like to have the ability to read peoples minds, so I would always know what they really thought, even though they may say something different. This would enable me to never be deceived, because I can’t stand being lied to.

Sounds like you’d be an asset to any superhero team! Thanks for talking with us today, Cory!

Check back later today for a cover reveal!

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Cory is the owner, founder, and head publisher at RainTown Press. He even dabbles in design, and has been known to do some writing in his spare time. His favorite book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and he’s always in search of the next Youth in Revolt.

Behind Visibility: Sarah on Superheroes

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All superheroes have one thing in common, and it isn’t spandex. They’re aliens. Maybe they’ve never been to outer space; maybe they’re human mutants, or “chosen” by some force, or the extremely lucky owners of some magic artifact/scientific marvel/humongous fortune that gives them access to everything they need. Or maybe they just got bit by the right bug. Whatever their origin, they aren’t “us” any more. They can pass, maybe, but they don’t fit.

But feeling exiled from humanity isn’t just a superhero thing. Any vet who’s been in combat knows what it’s like. Diabetics and celiacs know; so do cancer survivors. Any gifted kid who made it through high school without finding out why she always felt so out of place knows. Dyslexics know. Every teen who’s realized he really likes guys when all his friends are going girl-crazy, or who’s discovering that he just isn’t attracted to anyone that way, knows. If you’re too fat or too skinny, scare too easily, have a weird laugh, seem to be the designated loner at school or work, don’t speak the language or can’t pronounce it right; if for any reason you aren’t an “acceptable” friend to the people you desperately want to be friends with, then you know. Something happens, something breaks or grows or changes, and suddenly you don’t fit any more. And you think, This isn’t fair. Why is this happening to me? What do I get for going through this? If you’re any brand of comic book geek, you think, Why couldn’t it be something I could use, at least? Why not wings, or breathing underwater, or psychokinetic powers?

That’s why I like the not-quite-superhero stories best. The ones where the powers aren’t free or don’t quite fit, where learning how to use them takes a lot of work, where the “lucky” hero can’t seem to adjust. Maybe the power wasn’t wanted to begin with, or maybe it was meant for someone else and the hero feels like a permanent understudy. Maybe she can use it to make entire cities safe, but can’t make it pay the rent. Maybe it’s a relationship deal-breaker. Maybe he tries to stomp it down and pretend it doesn’t exist but it keeps coming back, creeping into his dreams, staring him in the eye until he blinks. That’s the sort of hero I can relate to. That one could be any of us. The fact that they do usually win, even with all the setbacks, stops looking trite and starts to look a little like hope.

To some extent, every gift comes with a curse. I think—or at least would like to think—that it works the other way around, too: every curse comes with a gift. There’s always a flip side. What makes you different is just like everything else that doesn’t kill you: it can make you stronger, as long as you work to see it for what it really is, and then to master it. As long as you don’t give up.

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A one-time member of Mensa, Sarah Neufeld loves solitude, literature, and travel. She is a true advocate of the graphic movement in literary circles, and draws on Japanese manga in particular to inform her writing. She currently resides in Portland, Oregon, and works as a freelance Japanese translator. When she isn’t busy writing, Sarah can be found learning new languages, hiking the urban forests around Portland, and enjoying manga over a cup of tea.

Enter the Giveaway!

Behind Visibility: Interview on Cover Designer

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Here is an exclusive interview with the cover designer of Visibility, Erin Clarkson.

What themes were you keeping in mind when you were designing the new cover for Visibility?

The strongest image that stuck with me after reading Visibility was this girl of shadows. I know the book is about superpowers, but I kept thinking of what it would be like to be an invisible teenager, and how lots of teens can be/feel invisible without any kind of super power. Also, the fact that Natalie uses sonar to see when she’s invisible was really a cool image concept. So when I first started searching for images I looked for things like “shadowy girl” and such. That was how I came across the image of the girl’s legs with the misty blue background. The other thing that I wanted to include was the blue eyes, because that is the one thing that Natalie and her mom have in common. I also thought that the combination of the eye, the ultimate expression of seeing and being seen, combined with the shadowy figure, really expressed Natalie’s struggle to find her identity as an invisible girl.

Were you going after a specific feel?

I definitely wanted to move away from the superhero/comic book theme that was established with the illustrationed publication of the book…[Visibility is] about a girl and her mom who have super powers, but it’s more about Natalie figuring out who she is. She’s spent her whole life overshadowed by her mom, even at her own birthday parties, and then she discovers that she’s inherited her mom’s awesome power and she has to figure out what that means for her. She knows that she doesn’t want to be her mom, so she has to forge her own path. So I wanted to focus more on Natalie and her struggle to be seen and be invisible.

This cover was designed specifically for e-only distribution. How did that affect your approach to the design?

When you are designing the jacket cover for a hardcover book you have to think about how the image you use will work across a wide canvas, stretching maybe even to the inside flaps of the book. With an ebook you only get to design the front cover, not the whole cover spread. This both makes the task easier and harder. Easier because you have a smaller space to design and you can use smaller images, but harder because you still have to imagine the image spreading beyond the edges of the cover. A cover design should press beyond the borders of the page, encompassing both the book and the intangible sense of the book. An ebook cover has to do all of that in a 6×9″ space.

Have you designed any other covers for RainTown Press?

Yes, I also designed the cover for the upcoming winter release The Last Burning of New London. That cover was very different from Visibility, but a lot of fun.

And, of course, do you have a favorite super power?

My favorite traditional super power would probably be flight, but I’m a big fan of Aquaman and his ability to breathe underwater.

Pretty tempting, I have to admit! Erin, thanks so much for chatting with us!

Check back Friday to see another of Erin’s covers!

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Erin Clarkson is a jack-of-all-trades at RainTown Press, doing some design here, some editing there, some marketing everywhere. In addition to her work on Visibility, she’s also done the interior and cover design for RainTown’s Winter release, The Last Burning of New London, by Danielle Myers.

Enter the Giveaway!

Behind Visibility: Different Faces of Design

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Once a week (or so), we feature publishing tips here on this blog; sort of our way of offering some hard-won advice to aspiring authors out in the trenches. One thing that authors always worry about is the cover for their book. And with good reason; covers are very important. Although there’s the old adage “never judge a book by its cover,” the truth is, a lot of people do. And that’s not always a bad thing. You can tell a lot about the intended audience for a book just by looking at its cover.

Visibility was originally self-published. This was quite a few years ago, long before we got our hands on it, and it looked a lot different at the time. You can see from the pic to the right that even the design was drastically different. It had a more mature feel to it, more like an adult novel or a Literary novel.

Then in 2008 Bowler Hat Comics decided to publish Visibility as an illustrated novel. They illustrated scenes from each chapter, and the book got a new cover, with a distinctly graphic-novel feel. You can see below that it was a big change from the original cover.

Although we’re keeping the illustrated version of Visibility available, when RainTown Press took on Visibility as our next project, we wanted to put our own mark on it. We loved Bowler Hat’s version, but we decided not to include illustrations in our electronic version of the book. E-readers have improved by leaps and bounds in recent years when it comes to comics and displaying images, but we didn’t want to limit our audience to those readers with the most complex devices.

Naturally, we decide to design a new cover for the book. We wanted to find something that would speak to a new audience. Something more YA, less graphic-novel. Erin, one of our newer members, came up with the gorgeous cover you see to your right, and the rest is history.

That’s a lot of faces for one book, isn’t it? If you’re an author and you’ve got a set idea of how you want your book to look, remember that there are a lot of different directions a designer can go. A different cover for every audience.

Check back tomorrow for an interview with Erin, the designer of the final cover!

Enter the Giveaway!

Behind Visibility: Interview with Sarah Neufeld

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Here is an exclusive interview with the author of Visibility, Sarah Neufeld.

It’s really fascinating how Natalie sees when she is invisible; basically through sonar. How did you come up with that twist on the power?

I remembered hearing someone say that true invisibility would be practically useless because transparent eyes wouldn’t register light. I thought it would be pretty bogus to have a superpower that crippled you to the point where you couldn’t do anything with it, and since invisible ears wouldn’t be affected at all, I had the power come with a type of echolocation to make up for the loss of vision.

Although Natalie is tackling a lot of hurdles in Visibility, none of them really involve romance, which is somewhat rare these days in YA. Was this a conscious choice on your part, or just how the story unfolded?

Mostly just how the story unfolded. Natalie hasn’t had much opportunity to connect with peers in a genuine way, and since she’s very aware of being Jadyn’s daughter first and her own person second, she’d be likely to suspect the motives of anyone who tried to get close to her. Besides, if she’d been the type to have a boyfriend, she probably would have used him to escape from this particular problem and skipped most of the story, leaving me up a creek without a paddle… *grin* I also thought she had enough on her plate at this point in her life, frankly.

The original publication of Visibility is illustrated. Did you write it with illustrations in mind?

That’s actually not the original! ^_^ I self-published an earlier version, and I didn’t have illustrations in mind when I wrote the book. Bowler Hat Comics, the first official publisher, primarily released graphic and illustrated novels, so when we decided to convert it to that format, we went through and chose scenes to illustrate. Even if it wasn’t my original plan, it was a lot of fun; I think I’d eventually like to write a book with the intent of having it illustrated.

Even the non-illustrated version of Visibility is still very visual. Were you inspired much by comics or graphic novels?

Absolutely yes. I was a total geek (still am), and I loved comic books, graphic novels, manga, etc. just as much as regular books-without-pictures. I was also very aware that comic books—especially the American type—tend to be written off as a throwaway medium, and that the more serious they try to be, the more lightly they tend to be taken. When I wrote “Visibility,” it was partly an attempt to prove that adding superpowers to a story doesn’t automatically make it one-dimensional. Whether I succeeded or not is up for debate, but I liked the challenge.

Are you working on any new projects right now?

Yes, but not officially. *grin* It may be a while.

Finally, if you had a superpower, what would it be?

Flying. Hands down….Except that’s what everybody says, so my second choice would probably be the ability to make multiple clones of myself with identical skill sets so I could get a week’s worth of work done in a day, and then go goof off. On the one hand, I’m sure the power would come with a wicked identity crises, times six or seven. On the other hand, getting lonely would be almost impossible.

Great choice! I could go in for a few hard-working clones, but they’d probaly all end up just as lazy as I am, so maybe nothing else would get done anyway…

Well, thanks for chatting with us Sarah!

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A one-time member of Mensa, Sarah Neufeld loves solitude, literature, and travel. She is a true advocate of the graphic movement in literary circles, and draws on Japanese manga in particular to inform her writing. She currently resides in Portland, Oregon, and works as a freelance Japanese translator. When she isn’t busy writing, Sarah can be found learning new languages, hiking the urban forests around Portland, and enjoying manga over a cup of tea.

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Behind Visibility: A Dream Come True

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Lucy Softich, Head Editor on Visibility.

When we acquired Visibility, I literally jumped for joy. People looked at me funny.

I had worked with author Sarah Neufeld a few times before. Once in an editing class in grad school, working on an in-progress manuscript, and later as an intern for Bowler Hat Comics, the publisher behind the illustrated version of Visibility. Unfortunately, we never got to work directly with each other. When we were approached by the head of Bowler Hat about taking on Visibility when he closed up shop, I was thrilled to finally have a chance to work along side this awesome author. I immediately volunteered to be the Head Editor for the project.

Visibility was an unusual case in that most of the editing had already been done. I did some copyediting and proofing for the e-book version, but mainly I was able to focus on the other details around the book: overseeing the cover design and planning this blog tour. An e-only release was a new move for RainTown, so we had that to consider. The fun thing about working for a new, small press is that you learn so much from each new project.

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Lucy Softich worked as the Head Editor on Visibility, and is the manager of RainTown’s Social Media department. She manages this blog, as well as maintaining RainTown’s Facebook page.

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The Visibility Blog Tour

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This blog tour will run for a full week. Articles and interviews from the author and publishing team will run on BlogTown, while readers can visit stops on the tour, learn about those blogs, and acquire super powers. There will be a giveaway at the end of the tour, and readers will have a chance of winning one of three prizes!

Grand Prize
$50 coupon to Amazon.com*

2 Runner-Up Prizes
$25 coupon to Amazon.com*

All 3 winners will also receive:
1 copy of Visibility, by Sarah Neufeld
1 copy of Spartacus and the Circus of Shadows, by Molly E. Johnson
1 advanced-reader copy of Wax, by Phil Duncan

Join the fun by filling out the Super Survey yourself!

Tour Stops

Monday: Shelf-Talkers Anonymous

Tuesday: Helene’s World of Books

Wednesday: Crabtank

Thursday: Booking Through 365

Friday: Adventures in Bookland

Saturday: Artsy Musings of a Bibliophile

* If the winners opt for giftcards to an indie bookstore, we’ll add an extra $5 to the card.

On August 26, enter the Giveaway!

Natalie Irving is used to living in the shadow of her infamous mother’s celebrity—she’s done it all her life. So when she discovers that she has inherited Jaydn’s claim to fame, the talent to turn invisible, she knows she finally has the chance to step into the spotlight. Now that she is one of only two people in the world with such an ability, Natalie has a choice to make: follow in her mother’s footsteps or choose a different path, crafting a unique identity that is hers alone.

Head to Head: Hugo Cabret

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YA books are all the rage right now, and movie-adaptations of said books are on the rise. There’s Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games, of course, but there are also movie adaptations of lesser-known books. One of those movies is Hugo, based on the middle-grade book by Brian Selznick The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

The book sells well, and the movie was highly talked-about when it came out in November. But how do the two match up? That’s what I’m here to talk about.

There may be some minor spoilers below, but I’ll try not to give anything major away.

Continue reading →