Monday, August 29, 2005

An imaginary cover for my Joe Novak novel


On my death bed, I toddled with Photoshop and Pagemaker and made a cover for The Dostoyevsky Reel, the Joe Novak P.I. novel I've written. I've been toying with the idea of putting up a small press publishing house and making this one of the first books in the line. I can't tell if that's pathetic or not, but it wouldn't be technically a self-publication, would it? (Other books would of course be new hardboiled and noir from the US and UK, with some classics and Finnish reprints thrown in.) The publishing house has already a name, Blood Hound Press (and it has a logo, too; you can see it in the right corner, in Finnish, that is: Verikoirakirjat).

I'm not much of an AD, but I kinda like this. It's supposed to be a very small paperback and printed on cheap paper (although with digital printing you can't really use cheap pulpy paper, but some recycled paper might resemble what I'm after, but we'll see). And it *is* supposed to be black & white.

Blood Hound Press *has* a book coming out next Fall, even though I wouldn't be legitimately putting the house up. I'm publishing a small booklet with three or four old crime stories by veteran Robert Silverberg, under the title See You In Hell. I found those stories in Seikkailujen Maailma and Bob gave me a permission to put them out. The stories are pretty grim early sixties noir, very straight-forward and violent. I don't think any of Silverberg's crime stories have ever been reprinted. I think some of them should merit being reprinted in English.

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