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, whose work you will see more of, brings us a shot from Mount Everest where newcomer Filip chills out at his desk while some of the new security features are at work in the background.

Nine days till official publication, people.

Bring your friends on board, use the buttons all over this site to share, and get everyone you know hooked on .

Want an early start? Don't mind eye strain?

So the contest is in full swing. Though I haven't really given it a "launch" so to speak. I've sort of mentioned it here and there but being busy with the new book I didn't get a chance to do all the fireworks and marching bands and dancing hippos that normally accompany a major announcement from Joseph Devon Industries.

But *is* live.

More details are at that link, but basically: create a work of art based on one of the Matthew and Epp books and y...

I have family in town this week. Like all of them. There's freaking kids and siblings everywhere. They pop up at New York City landmarks and appear in buses seemingly at will. Overall it's fun when we do this but also exhausting and quite confusing. Taking numerous children along to any event suddenly changes the dynamic entirely. Dinner's become games of "Don't Spill the Pasta," and sporting events aren't about sporting events but revolve around who can spot the guy selling Hot Dogs the...

Over the course of my internet marketing hijinks, I wind up slightly ahead of the curve on some things. Slightly. Like I get there right before your mom starts asking about it. There are people who are on top of every new gadget and social networking site from the beginning.

I am not one of them.

But I usually arrive at these tools with some degree of timeliness and manage to get a foothold in before they move on to version 2.0 which ruins everything.

Sometimes, however, I'm just way off.

Probabi...

Over the course of trying to market myself and my books , I wind up tinkering around in a lot different places. I forced myself to sign up for Twitter when I didn't want to and I joined Facebook under a fake name at first because I had no urge to deal with it. There are currently more reviews for my books up on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ than there are on Amazon and I don't even know what's going on at Librarything.

To say the least, things get very scattered. Not only do I contribute to these different sites ...

On Tuesday I showed you the brand new cover for Probability Angels. Today I'm pleased to announce that the cover for Persistent Illusions is finished. Are you ready to see it?

Well too bad. Thus far I've managed to keep pretty much nothing about this book covered up. I've shown the countdown pictures to friends, shown family most of the book and leaked Part One right here on the website.

But I'm hell bent on keeping the cover a secret until the actual release.

So in lieu of showing you the...

It took me awhile, but I finally figured it out. I wanted to put some indication on the cover of Probability Angels that it was the first book of a series but my earlier attempts were muddled. The fonts I were using made the words blur together. This was sort of annoying because I'm using my publisher's cover template. You'd think they'd have figured stuff like that out…anyway, a few tweaks and I got it:

Looking at it now it's a little shocking how freaking difficult it was to add those eight ...

I paired up with GoodReads again to offer up a large giveaway for Probability Angels. This led me to order a ton of books which were to be delivered by the United States Postal Service.

Okay, so here we go.

Coming home one day I found a "peach slip," as it's known, in my mailbox. Someone had tried to deliver my multiple boxes of books, I wasn't home, so they leave me a slip. The slip says I could either go to the post office and pick up my boxes or schedule a redelivery. This was fine. This...

I now have a proof copy of the new book sitting in my hot little hands. Ordering proofs is an important part of the process since you are able to see what you got right as far as font size, formatting, cover, etc.

I was able to see that I got none of those things right. Though I did spell the title correctly.

Actually, the cover doesn't look bad. But it's just one of the stock covers they offer over at CreateSpace.com and that isn't very exciting. I can do better.

So…here it is:

That's with a...

Tada!

Though this doesn't mean, you know, anything. I mainly wanted to start getting a sense of what font I was going to use as well as font size so I could start to get my head around how many pages this thing is for real.

Well, I guess that does mean something. It's around 425 pages. That's long! How the hell did that happen? And I don't even think that the current font will work unless you enjoy eye-strain. So…yeah this book is longer than the first one.

That means it's jam-packed with even m...