Hello, everyone!
I hope that this week finds you well! I have a new story out this week, and it’s one that I’m very proud of, and today I’ll be talking a little bit about the cover in greater depth for some fun. Before we get started with the discussions of the cover itself though? I should probably put that cover here, along with links to where you can find it on both Amazon and Smashwords!
This story is a fun one! Betrayal. Family traditions. Sexy women controlling other women and sexy women being controlled… It’s good stuff, if I do say so myself. I recommend picking up a copy today, but I might be a tiny bit biased.
Traditions is available now on both Amazon and Smashwords! Pick up a copy today, leave a review, a rating, whatever you’d like! I’m not sure how much it affects sales, but it’s on Goodreads if you want to go there, too!
So, with all of that business out of the way, let’s move on to talking about the cover, mm?
At its core, it isn’t a very complicated idea. It’s just a blonde woman with whited-out eyes, some very lovely painted lips, and some words. Anyone who is familiar with the erotic mind control community knows what blanked out eyes mean, and who doesn’t like a nice pair of lips?
By the way, the idea for how I put borders/colored transparent bits under some of the text on my covers? Owed 110% to covers I saw made/used by the brilliant a. regina cantatis, one of my earliest inspirations in fetish writing. If you haven’t read her Tenpack of Trixies or Willing Subject… you are missing out. All of them are good, but that’s where I recommend starting. Anyway, I owe her a lot, and you should buy her books, review them, comment on her blog… etc! Just be respectful that she’s been a bit busy with life to give us more smut. She deserves our understanding!
Whited out eyes is something I’ve found oddly erotic for a very long time. At this point, it’s basically for as long as I can remember? But I really got into it all over again when I found the yahoo groups that would become the Hypnopics Collective way back in the day. They’re all gone now, or they will be when Yahoo remembers how to actually delete them (I swear, Yahoo is just mess after mess after mess…) but for a long time they were the big way to share content online!
A lot of people would make tutorials, showing how to make a beam shoot out from off screen, or some object, and how to make the lighting look good, how to change this or that… and these days, I wish I’d kept a lot more of that. Those tutorials are basically how I learned to use photoshop. I was… bad. Terrible. I still feel my photoshop skills pale in comparison to say… Callidus? But I guess I also don’t have nearly the same level of experience.
So while making covers is a relatively new thing for me (at least covers like this! I actually used to make movie posters and book covers but they were both done with assets I didn’t have the rights to use, and with far fewer concerns than ‘that looks neat!’) theidea of manipulating photos and other art assets to make something sexy and fun? Something I’ve been toying around with for a very long time. That tradition of editing pictures to make something innocent into mind control, or to make something smutty into something kinky, is basically responsible for all of the art I twist today into something for promotion, or for fun!
Things have really changed a lot online, and a lot of us who have been using it since the Netscape Navigator and ICQ days can be a little bit obnoxious about just whinging for the past to return. While I miss things like Livejournal, I think that what we have now, for the most part, is actually pretty great! I wouldn’t want to be stuck back there, or to go back there… but some traditions, like manipulating photos to make them so much sexier in very specific ways?
A lot of fun.
If you’d like to talk with other fans of my writing more about Traditions, my work, or anything similar, join us over on the Madam Kistulot’s Domain Discord!
If you’d like to chat more generally with other kinky fetishists in a non playspace that is there just to discuss and explore mind control in all of its literary forms (games, movies, books, more!) then you can join the Mind Control Literature discord, right over here!
That’s all for now! I’ll be posting another blog post over on my Patreon shortly for all of my backers (and another story tomorrow!) so head over there if you don’t want to miss out!
For now…?
Take care of yourselves, and each other!