Tigerpetal Press : Roswell First Contact by Tony B. Richard

Earth’s Secret Alliance Book 1: Roswell First Contact

Tony B. Richard

Published: February 18, 2022

Synopsis: “When Private Malcolm Dow went to clean up a crashed weather balloon, he came face-to-face with an alien instead.
Being an alien of sorts in his own otherwise all-white regiment, Malcolm instantly took on the Alien’s plight – military help for his besieged planet, Zalma.
And it’s not just Zalma; Earth will be next. But to do so, he must first overcome the obstacles he’s faced since childhood and find a voice for himself. The trouble is, he’s not the only one who knows they’re here.

Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Young Adult

Available in: Paperback (regular, large print, dyslexia-friendly), eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 90 (regular print)

Purchase a copy from Amazon.ca
Visit Tony B. Richard’s author website

Tony B. Richard was my first long-standing client. He approached be about his series, Earth’s Secret Alliance, back when it had first been published and he was looking to rewrite it. He’d been through multiple editors before me and was looking for someone he could get quality work from. I made myself that person.

The Process

The first thing we did was discuss the series as a whole and what he wanted it to become. He provided many documents including a full series layout, character profiles, research, and more, and once I’d read through these, I read his first book draft and sent over my evaluation.

We continued our discussion about improvements to the series, how to structure the first book, and so on, and one day, Tony approached me about Book Doctoring, which, for those who don’t know, is nearly Ghostwriting, but can be categorized with Developmental Editing.

Tony is a great storyteller, but his narration skills were still brand new. Most of the story was dialogue anyway, interspersed with dialogue tags and “laughed” and “smiled” and “nodded” in abundance. My job was to strip the novella down to its barest bones (the dialogue and a few directive actions) and turn it into descriptive prose.

(I’m proud to say that over a year later, Tony has really come into his own as a scriptwriter/screenwriter, which fits a lot better with his style than prose!)

I continued this back-and-forth stream of emails with Tony, sending him my draft, which he would share with his beta readers for feedback, do his own editing, and send back to me for review. We then moved on to technical editing. Finally, we deemed the book ready, and began with designing.

I came up with a few mock-up covers based on the previous covers he made and my own ideas. Tony also used Fiverr freelancers for other mock-ups. Eventually, he was approached by a new professional book cover designer by the name of Alex Perkins, who designed the beautiful cover you see that the book has today. Alex uses Adobe Photoshop to create his covers with photomanipulation and editing.

While Alex was working on the cover, I got to work in the interior pages of the book. I created a template that would later be used for each of the future books—one for each of the versions of the book Tony wanted available: regular print, large print, and dyslexia-friendly print. The reasoning behind these different formats is that Tony himself has dyslexia and he wanted to make sure it was accessible to all readers.

Once the design for each version was finalized, I went about typesetting, and shared the final page count with Alex, who could then finish the covers. I helped a little with the typography on the back of the book, giving Alex pointers here and there, as at the time he was still new to designing book covers.

I’m quite proud of our final product.