The Complete Yoshimi comes to paperback

That would be the cover for The Whole Bloody Affair, a.k.a. The Complete Yoshimi.

Available here in paperback!

For those unfamiliar with Yoshimi and her fictional and well as publishing history, here's a brief recap: The warrior orphan was originally conceived at the behest of a friend's budding publishing label.  They were just getting into the business of releasing novels at the time, and I saw this as an opportunity.  I don't tend to write terrifically straightforward fiction (in other words, I'm more of a literary guy than James Patterson, or in other other words I'm not usually very commercial in the traditional sense).  Yoshimi's story was immediately cast in the vein of things I'd enjoyed, in books and film (and her name taken from a Flaming Lips album), the revenge plot.

The complete story is very similar to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third in that series, while it borrows significantly from Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's Kill Bill.  The truth isn't always what it seems, and Yoshimi has a lot of people to defeat along the way.  (So, she's also similar to Scott Pilgrim!)

The small publisher folded in the midst of the planning stages for the book's release.  

Earlier this year I started and intended to release each of the book's three volumes separately.  Then a lot of things very rapidly changed for me, and I lost the original schedule.  When things finally settled down again, I had the impulse to release the whole story in a single volume, as I had intended to at the conclusion of the serialization.  And so here we are.

As for the cover, I've pretty much been sticking to the available templates at CreateSpace, and that's true again here.  The color scheme is an homage to the iconic posters for Kill Bill, Vol. 1 while also evoking the red pattern for the second (here it takes the shape of an ominous field of blood).

As to whether or not I'm trying to trick unsuspecting consumers into buying my book by using a phrase closely associated with Kill Bill, well, as far as I figure, Tarantino is in no rush to use it, and it has a nice ring.  Why not?  (Then again, perhaps I'll find out.)

...Of course, it's my fervent wish that this is the very last book I'll ever have to release myself, and I hope I'm going out with a bang.