Wild Puma’s first foray into ebooks is out there – The Temple of Beauty (and other stories), five unique tales of SF and fantasy, all for the bargain price of $0.99. It’s plain to me this volume is already in contention for many major awards, such as:

• Sesquipedalian Award for longest character name!
• Andrew Zimmer Award for most grotesque cuisine.
• Roses-are-red-and-violets-stink Award for worst poetry in an epic fantasy … the competition was heavy on this one, folks!

One of the most fun parts of bringing ToB together was the cover. Based on a suggestion from an fellow FB group member, I went to 99 Designs, a kind of crowd-sourcing/contest-based site for many types of design, from logos to tatoos and, of course, book covers. AT 99 Designs I declared a contest for designing the ToB cover. The title of the contest was: 70s style cool fantasy book cover . The description was:

A book cover for ebook publication, conforming to Amazon standard size, etc. The book is a comic fantasy, entitled “The Temple of Beauty”; subtitle is “And other stories”. The concept for the cover is to show a stunningly beautiful red-haired woman, dressed mostly in green as an adventurer-sorceress, sitting astride a giant, white-furred, sabre-toothed rabbit. Both the woman and the rabbit should look dangerous but not evil. The setting is an isolated mountain pass.

I would like a retro look, reminiscent of the Andre Norton book covers of 60s and 70s.

The contest ran 11 days overall and in that time I got 24 submissions from 11 artists! Here are some of the best:

More later on the production of Temple of Beauty, and other titles forthcoming from Wild Puma. Till then …