When the Cover Comes Before the Story

I just received my shipment of several boxes of author's copies of THE DARKNESS AFTER, finally seeing the finished product for the first time yesterday.  Many readers actually had it in their hands before I did, as print copies were shipping from Amazon at the beginning of last week and the Kindle Edition has been available even longer.  I really like the job that my publisher, Ulysses Press, did with the cover design on this book:In fact, the cover was designed before I had even fully developed the characters and the story, and the image of the archer with drawn bow silhouetted against a skyline on the edge of a dark city actually changed the direction of the plot in more than subtle ways.My original intention last year upon publication of THE PULSE was to immediately get started on the sequel.  My editor, however, suggested a parallel story with younger characters, and at first I wasn't sure this was a good idea.  I didn't want to leave readers of THE PULSE waiting indefinitely for the sequel, but when this story started unfolding, I realized that there was lot of room in the grid-down world I created in THE PULSE for this and potentially many more stories.  After all, countless people would be affected by such an event, and they all would have their stories.  So while THE DARKNESS AFTER is not a direct sequel to my first novel, readers of THE PULSE will find a familiar setting they have already been introduced to in the outlying areas of New Orleans and the backwoods of south Mississippi.  And as it turns out, this story led me in a direction that certainly begs for a sequel of its own.