Steampunk Holmes: Frankenstein to be illustrated by Yun Ling!

Yun Ling, Random Paint, October 2011

Sometimes things happen for a reason.  As you know from this website, the art work that Daniel Cortes did for Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus is outstanding.  He is a fantastic artist, so we were really sad to discover that he wouldn't be able to do all the art for Steampunk Holmes: Frankenstein.  We had to find a new artist to do mechanicals and illustrations.

We looked at literally hundreds of artists, gave up for awhile, looked some more, gave up again, and finally we found exactly the right artist in the work of Yun Ling.  Ling is the Senior Concept Artist at Volta, a computer games company, and is originally from China.  His work is very well regarded and Daniel Cortes was absolutely thrilled that Ling will be picking up where he left off. So are we!

The second book in the series, Steampunk Holmes: Frankenstein, is a dark book about humanity, or our lack of it, and the art needed to reflect a certain darkness.  Yun Ling's style is a perfect mix of elements that are just downright scary. It's perfect - and having looked at the work of so many other very talented artists we were thrilled when Yun Ling agreed to join the project.

In addition to doing the big scenes, Yun Ling will also be doing the new mechanicals drawings. Some mechanicals will be familiar to readers (such as Watson's Arm and the Widowmakr) but there will also be a lot of new devices all rendered in Yun Ling's unique style. 

Yun Ling, Concept Art, Volta

For the portraits, Daniel Cortes will return to the project - the scope of that work is small enough that he can handle it in addition to all his other work.  We are thrilled to be working with Daniel again and to be working with Yun Ling for the first time.   Get ready this winter for Steampunk Homes: Frankenstein – it’s going to be fantastic!

An Update on All versions of Steampunk Holmes

Steampunk Holmes will be distributed in many formats this year: paper book, ebook, web book, audiobook, and iPad. The paper edition is at the printer right now and should be available to ship by the end of this month. You can pre-order it on Amazon.com.  The eBook has been available for a while on SmashWords, but now you can also buy it from Amazon.com.  The audiobook is just now getting ready for editing - it will probably be ready within a couple months but no promises on that yet.  We are still looking for a capable team to develop the Web book site, which will provide access to all the books as interactive web pages on an annual subscription basis.

Development of the iPad book app edition is going to take a while – four months at least – but the guys at Floodlight Software - that's the company programming that book app for us - are already off to a stellar start. 

This past week Floodlight Software delivered a portion of the functionality, which we used as a demo, at the BookExpo America (BEA) – the largest book fair in the United States.  Our Chief Marketing Officer, Julie Brannon, presented the demo of our iPad book app to more than 100 different publishers at the BookExpo and the response was overwhelmingly positive! The demo was rock solid, and although limited compared to the final product, it was of the highest quality. No unexpected error screens or hiccups during the dozens of demos Julie gave at the BookExpo. 

We'll continue to blog our progress with all the different editions of Steampunk Holmes. The goal is, and always has been, to release all five editions (i.e eBook, paper book, audiobook, iPad book app, and Web book) by the end of November.