Jenn LeBlanc

The image above was the first picture I ever made for this project and here it comes, the end of the year. Officially, I started illustrating this novel on January 9, 2010. SO for me this year has been momentous. The thing of it is, when I started I had no idea it would go this far. Originally I thought I would shoot the cover as a control-freak of a photographer. Of course, then it mushroomed into a few illustrations. Those illustrations were so fantastic and telling (and we had so much fun shooting them), and they added so much to the basic story that I decided to expand on them, to take it as far as I could. Eight photo shoots later I have a fully illustrated romance novel.

The learning curve has been deadly, the expense deadlier, studio time, costuming, flying my lead model around (since he moved shortly after the first two shoots, and I tried to replace him, but he just really wasn’t replaceable.) learning all the ins and out of ebooks, etc…

My hopes however have done nothing but grown. I really think I have done something wonderful here, something others will want to copy, and I hope…HOPE… they call me. I would love to work on illustrations for other novels, I would love to work with other authors to expand their stories to the visual. There are other forms of new media that involve eReaders, but they have different formats, including video. I don’t think video is appropriate accompaniment for a novel, I think it’s disruptive to the flow of the story, not to mention the fact that if you have pretty much any eReader, besides the iPad, you have to move to your computer to see the video. The great thing about the still images is they are inobtrusive, they flow with the story in the pages, they don’t interrupt the reading experience, rather they enhance it.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the majority of my marketing test subjects, but so far all is good. I look forward to this being the first, of many, of this kind of new media.