Tigerpetal Press : Negotiations by Tony B. Richard

Earth’s Secret Alliance Book 2: Negotiations

Tony B. Richard

Published: May 20, 2022

Synopsis: The Zalmen have arrived on Earth hungry for collaboration. But they’re about to lose their appetite.
In 1947, master diplomat Ryan Wilcox is asked to negotiate an interplanetary alliance. It’s an opportunity that Earth can’t afford to miss. The aliens offer knowledge that will speed up human advancement by hundreds of years.
However, the Zalmen are vegetarians and have never seen meat before. They become fearful of humans.
Will Ryan rise to the challenge and find common ground? Or is it the end of life as we know it?

Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Young Adult

Available in: Paperback (regular, large print, dyslexia-friendly), eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 114 (regular print)

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

The second episode in Earth’s Secret Alliance, and the second book that I helped Tony with. He wanted the book to be chronologically after Malcolm Dow’s story, but able to be read separately from that episode, which is difficult to do when working with an overarching series like this one. The idea was to do the same thing as Marvel has done with the Avengers, giving each character their own story, then bringing them all together for the “final boss” so to speak.

The Process

Since we already did a series overview when working on the first book, and since this book was already laid out and written, we dove right in. I began with some preliminary beta reading to point out flaws and inconsistencies in the story, as well as where and how the book didn’t match the new angle we were going for with the series as a whole.

Draft 2 was all about book doctoring. After Tony made the edits from my beta reading comments, I went through, stripped the text down to the bones, and narrated as the book needed. After I sent it back to Tony, he would decide what he wanted to keep, what he wanted to cut, and what he wanted rewritten. Then, he would send it to his other beta readers for review and feedback.

Once the story was complete, we turned to Alex, who had been designing the cover concept as we worked on the story. I typeset the text using the template I’d made for book 1 and was quickly able to give the finalized page counts to Alex. While he was finishing up cropping the covers to size and finishing typography, the book was sent for proofreading.

I’m a big fan of the running theme of the covers to have a silhouette of the main character facing their challenge as laid out in the book. It paints them as being small and outmatched, but also strong as they stand tall against the situation. Alex has always done such a great job with his book cover creations.