Tigerpetal Press : The Good the Bad and the Undecided by Tony B. Richard

Earth’s Secret Alliance Book 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Undecided

Tony B. Richard

Published: August 18, 2022

Synopsis: After the end of WWII, General Greg Newman is looking for new ways to add stars to his shoulders. A week after the claims of aliens in Roswell, he is presented with a unique opportunity, two powerful superior officers want his attention. One extending the hand of friendship and the other offering the promotion he’s wanted so desperately.
Greg takes hold of both, and for once, it seems everything is going his way. Then the illusion falls, and Greg finds himself in a downward spiral of deceit and betrayal. There’s only one person who can pull him out of it—himself.

Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Young Adult

Available in: Paperback (regular, large print, dyslexia-friendly), eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 94 (regular print)

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This book is so far my personal favourite of the series, as I enjoy what we did with Greg’s character arc throughout the story. This book is, admittedly, less sci-fi and more military fiction, as reflected through the cover.

The Process

The first step in turning this idea into a proper story was figuring out what it is trying to say. With my editorial assessment, I outlined the strengths and weaknesses of the story, as well as offered suggestions for the big picture ideas for Tony to rewrite. After that, we were able to focus on the details such as laying out individual scenes, setting up characters, and breathing life into the story as a whole.

Once that whole process was complete and the story had gone through several runs of editing, rewriting, and beta reading, I was able to go through the entire thing with my eye out for spelling errors and the like, and then it was time to begin designing.

As this is the third book of a series, the design remained generally the same, with the only changes being the content itself. And again, like with the last two books, I created a regular print version, using Arno Pro, a dyslexic version using a dyslexic-friendly font, a large print version, and an eBook version for Kindle readers.

We worked with Alex Perkins on the cover, and like the other two books, he included the main character on the cove, but the difference here was him making Greg take up much more room than Malcolm or Ryan ever did. This, I believe is to show that Greg is already comfortable with who he is as a general, but the lesson he must learn is to make himself smaller, to make room for better things in his life. His ego is just a big too big at the beginning, and he has a lot of personal growing to do.