In the beginning, I imagined the cover of Kelvoo’s Testimonial looking like most science fiction covers, with an artistic rendering of one of the key scenes from the book. I won’t give away what those key scenes may have been, since I wouldn’t want to reveal too much of the plot.

​While I was sketching a very rough idea of what Kelvoo looks like, I was thinking about the fact that Kelvoo’s Testimonal stands out because it’s written from Kelvoo’s non-human perspective, as an autobiographical work. This made me think about some of the book covers for autobiographies of famous people. . .

. . . That’s when it occurred to me to use the idea of an autobiographical style of cover. The benefit of such a cover is that it immediately draws attention to the fact that this book, dealing with human first contact, is written from a non-human’s perspective.
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Here are four conceptual mock-ups that sprang to mind.

While some (mostly me) have said that the pencil crayon drawings possess a certain “homespun charm”, I am working with a professional artist to produce a top quality depiction of a kloormar. More about that in a later blog post.

There is one item that I forgot to include on my mocked-up covers. Did you spot it?... The author’s name! Perhaps my modesty was the cause, though certain of my family members may tend to differ.

As I write this, I really don’t know what the final cover will look like, but at least you know where I started.

​The first step in the publishing process for Kelvoo’s Testimonial was to get a professional opinion from an independent third party. An editorial evaluation helps to determine the quality of a manuscript and discusses the steps that could be taken to improve upon the work to increase its appeal to a wide audience. I was satisfied with Kelvoo’s Testimonial and people close to me loved it, but without feedback from a neutral party, how could I really judge the work given the likely biases of my readers up to that point?

An editorial evaluation was performed in June and July, 2021. The evaluation listed the story’s strengths and areas in need of improvement. The evaluation had several pages of details. Here are just a couple of excerpts from the “Strengths” section:

“The novel is well-structured and well-paced. After setting the stage in terms of what this book is about, why it’s being written, and who the kloormari are, you do a great job of pulling us through the novel by crafting chapters that each have a clear setup, complication, and resolution.”

“Despite the fantastic subject matter, the novel also feels highly realistic. This is helped by the level of detail involved but also by the frequent asides to the reader. Over time, it feels like a real first-person account of actual events.”

Under “Potential Areas of Improvement”, the main point was:

“The only real issues I identified have to do with the mechanics of the prose itself, particularly in terms of grammar, punctuation, and style.”

This section listed a wide variety of improvements, especially regarding my writing of dialogue. Kelvoo’s Testimonial is my first significant work that is written in first person form with a great deal of dialogue, so there were many issues with correct use of quotation marks and punctuation. Additional areas needing work included:

• Compound Sentences
• Dialogue Attributions
• Prepositional Phrases
• Oxford Comma
• Dashes
• Ellipses
• Numbers (using numerals vs. spelling out numbers as words)

Overall, I was very happy with the results of the editorial evaluation since it indicates that I’ve written an engaging story. At the same time, I was pleased with the level of detail and examples of areas that need to be cleaned up from a technical perspective.

​As a result of the editorial evaluation, a “complex edit” is now underway to tighten up the text and improve the overall writing style without altering my story. The complex edit work started in mid-August. As I write this, we are in the first week of September, so I’m expecting to see the results in the next week or two. I can’t wait to see the improvements!