🩸👑💀 BOOK TITLE REVEAL + Character Comparisons
ALSO: That one time I visited The Gates of Hell...
Happy Sunday!
Today I’m going to be sharing a series of graphics that I’ve designed to showcase characters from the gothic historical fantasy book I’m querying + their popular media character comparisons to give you a better idea of who each of them is! 🥳
BUT FIRST…
I think it’s about time I stopped using code names (🩸👑💀) or long descriptions to talk about this book every time I mention it—which is a lot, since it’s the book I’m querying and therefore the one I talk about the most!
If you’ve been following me from the Very Beginning, you might have already seen the title of my book when I first put it on a pitch post last August. But early on in my querying journey, I noticed people didn’t talk about their books using titles and I heard you shouldn’t post titles of the books you query in pitches/on social media because people might steal your title. So, naturally, I deleted all my old posts with my book’s title on it and stopped using it for pitches.
HOWEVER… I think it’s apparent now that after several months of querying & seeing a few books recently get announced with similar titles to mine…worrying about someone stealing the name of my book feels so unnecessary when I can’t even get an agent to request my full manuscript 😅 But while I’ve kept the book title under wraps, I was also hoping the secrecy and anticipation would be worth it once I could use the excuse of good publishing news to come out with it publicly—but that hasn’t quite happened yet! lol and honestly, it doesn’t even matter anymore because it was simply the act of making my character comps graphic series look good that influenced my spontaneous decision to stop keeping the title secret! 😂
I wanted to obviously do a cover/intro page for social media for this series of graphics, but it wouldn’t sound catchy if I titled it ‘character comparisons for the gothic historical fantasy book I’m querying’ (TOO LONG) or ‘character comps for 🩸👑💀 book’ (TOO ELEMENTARY). So then, I typed my book’s title on the intro page…
AND IT LOOKED SO RIGHT.
Please allow me to reintroduce the gothic historical fantasy book I am querying with its proper title:
—THE BLOOD OF A DIVINE—
Set against the backdrop of 1899 London, Paris, and Rome, the half-human son of the Lord of the Underworld and a crew of demon hunters embark on a literal journey to Hell to prevent the end of the world in a dark and dazzling epic about deeply complicated families, a doomed romance blooming on the brink of an apocalypse, and the dilemma of a reluctant hero who has to choose whether or not to take his brother’s life to save the world.
✨Now let’s get on with the character comparison fun! ✨
I hope you’re excited because these character comparison boards were a lot of fun to make & picking each character’s notable quote for these graphics rejuvenated my confidence as a writer/for my book—and I’m so excited for everyone to get to know all the main characters in The Blood of a Divine a bit better! 😊
And that is basically the main cast of The Blood of a Divine! 🩸👑💀
To close out this newsletter, I wanted to share a fun fact about the background design of these graphics—because it’s a photo I took myself :)
If you’re ever in Paris, take a visit to Musée Rodin and you’ll find some of the most amazing -and my favorite- works of sculpture art by the famous Auguste Rodin. While I was living and studying abroad in Paris, I actually stumbled into the garden of this museum by accident and came across a very familiar sculpture, and then said, “Hey, is that The Thinker?” 😂 It was Fashion Week, the actual historical site I wanted to visit that day was closed for a runway show, and so I took a short walk nearby just to explore and ended up at Musée Rodin!
Apart from sculpting wonderfully detailed and tender images of intimacy and humanity, Rodin was obsessed with depicting images of Hell and demons based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, and that background image in each of my graphics is actually a photo of The Gates of Hell, an art installation that took decades for Rodin to create. It wasn’t even fully completed and presented until after his death.
And for scale, here’s me standing at The Gates of Hell :D
Fun fact #2: while I am somewhat familiar with the concept of Dante’s poem, I purposely made the choice to not finish reading it when I was outlining The Blood of a Divine because I didn’t want to be influenced by his version of Hell, like so many books, tv shows, film, etc. are in popular media. BUT I did love the concept of a gate between our world and Hell, and in The Blood of a Divine, finding a gate to Hell is one of the most important things in the book that my characters have to concern themselves with… 👀
Well, that’s it for this week’s newsletter! 😊
Please feel free to comment and tell me, based on the character comp graphic series, which character you are most intrigued by and want to learn more about AND/OR which is your favorite quote! ❤
Til next time,
-Jazmin