Lisa Shea Collective Saga Book

SciFi Romance Novel Cover Designs

by Lisa Shea

I’ve been writing scifi romance novels for over a decade. Cover designs for this genre have gone through quite a lot of changes in that time. I just in 2025 finished my latest revamp of the covers for my four-book Collective Saga series, plus the box set. All four books – Aquarian Awakenings, Betelgeuse Beguiling, Centauri Chaos, and Draconis Discord – are now fully updated in ebook and print on all platforms. While I was at it, I did an editing pass of all four books to make some minor tweaks.

As an author, it is critically important that you regularly review what the current best-selling covers look like and make sure your books hold their own against that style. You can look at nearly any long-lasting well-selling series to see that they regularly update their covers.

Here’s the progression taken by my Aquarian Awakenings book – this is book 1 in The Collective Saga.

Try #1 – aquarian symbol – people thought it was a self-help book for people of the sign Aquarius.

Try #2 – nebula – again people thought it was for Aquarians.

Try #3 – cartoon people – this looked too much like a children’s book and was hard to see the image.

Try #4 – cartoon people – clearer to see, but just gave a sense of a romance on a distant planet.

Try #5 – human models – much better at drawing in my target audience. People knew this was a space romance. However they complained that my book wasn’t sex-filled enough. The cover drew in readers of racy romance.

Try #6 – human models with space uniforms – now my target audience didn’t assume it would be full of sex. Much better. However, in modern times many readers of romance prefer not to be seen carrying around ‘bodice ripper’ covers. They want much more subtle covers. Also, modern buyers on cellphones need to be able to clearly see giant-letters in a title.

Current cover – giant letters. Clearly about space. Not screaming ‘romance’ which apparently buyers want. They know it’s romance because they were browsing in the romance category to find it. I admit this is an adjustment for me personally because I grew up in the era of romance covers screaming romance on them. I still think of sexy cover models as ‘natural’. I need to adjust my mindset to reach a modern reader.

Ask with any questions!

Herbert West Reanimator Part 1 – From The Dark by H. P. Lovecraft Review and Analysis

by Lisa Shea

The Herbert West Reanimator series by H. P. Lovecraft is six short stories which were published episode by episode in a magazine. Each one was required to have a cliff-hanger ending, drawing a person to buy the next magazine issue. Each story was required to have a recap at the beginning so that a person who happened to pick up magazine #2 could catch up and enjoy the story without having to track down issue #1 to read the first story.

For these reasons, it’s a really good idea to NOT binge-read these. I recommend reading story 1, giving yourself some time to digest, reading story 2, and so on. That helps the repetitive nature of the introductions seem less egregious. It could even be a bit helpful to be reminded of the storyline.

We begin episode 1, From The Dark, knowing that we have a pair of precocious college students. There’s an unnamed narrator and there’s his domineering friend Herbert West. We also know that 17 years in the future something mysterious happens to West. But we’re not going to learn WHAT that is for quite a while.

For now, we’re immersed in the college years. West loves slaughtering cats, dogs, monkeys, etc. all in the name of trying to bring one back to life. Then he gets bored with bland life and wants to start playing with human beings. ‘Two negroes’ are able to acquire dead humans from who-knows-where, and soon there’s a rogue lab set up in an abandoned farmhouse. Now West-plus-narrator are digging up random bodies.

The body they find is “youth of wholesome plebeian type—large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired—a sound animal without psychological subtleties” – clearly the two college students look down on this inferior creature. Oh, it gets far worse going forward.

Anyway, they try their experiment, think they’ve failed, only to have him spectacularly erupt to life. The two students run screaming and the house burns down. And then, 17 years later …

cliffhanger.

I’m just not drawn to this story. Yes, it’s one of the first-ever zombie stories. But the main character is a bland blond-blue-eyed-frail jerk. His best friend is never described and just mindlessly follows him. What is up with Lovecraft writing about strong-willed main characters and weak males who follow around behind them?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Here’s the story.

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hwr.aspx

My video review of Herbert West Reanimator series Part 1 / From The Dark –

Celephais by H. P. Lovecraft Review and Analysis

Celephaïs by H. P. Lovecraft Review and Analysis

by Lisa Shea

I was doing reasonably well on a week-by-week progression of Lovecraft’s stories in the order of publication up until November 2024. Then life threw some serious challenges at me. Here it is May 2025. I finally am getting back to this project. This means that while, in previous sessions, I only read a given story a handful of times before interpreting it, I’ve probably read Celephaïs 20 times or more because I kept thinking I’d be ready to do the write-up and then something else happened.

Unfortunately, Celephaïs just isn’t one of my favorite stories. If I was going to be ‘forced’ to reread a story this many times to prepare, I wish it had been one of the other stories. One could say that maybe that lack of interest is why I just didn’t get to it in a timely fashion.

I suppose I’m grateful that at least Celephaïs started at the beginning, unlike many of Lovecraft’s previous stories. Kuranes is a man in his fifties who once was rich and noble, but now his mansion is sold, his wealth is gone, and he’s stuck in a normal apartment with the average folk. He hates this. Not only that, but the average folk oddly (?) don’t enjoy his writings about how wonderful his life used to be when he could be sexist and racist and do whatever he wanted to. So he’s also become a hermit.

The only place he’s happy is in his dreams, where he is absolute Master of his Universe. And suddenly he dreams the Ultimate Dream, one he’d had when he was quite young, where an entire kingdom of his own creation, full of mind-boggling obsequious slaves, lay ready to cater to his every wish. Kuranes is joyful. He’s been waiting for this for decades. And then he keeps trying to have that same dream, but unfortunately his dreams go back to just ‘nice’ dreams of lovely flowers and cherry blossoms and such. But he’s not happy. He wants his ultimate dream full of googly-eyed slaves eager to do his every bidding.

So he takes giant doses of hashish.

Now he’s talking with violet-colored gasses about infinity. And, also, he’s spent all his money so he’s kicked out of his apartment. He’s homeless.

Luckily for him, a contingent of fully-armored knights comes along and escorts him through beautiful rural villages from the time of Chaucer. You know, the times where kings could do whatever they wanted including sleeping with any girl they happened across. And then he leaps off a cliff to go to his promised land, although unfortunately his earthly body crashes to die, forgotten, on the rocks.

So, what did we learn here.

Lovecraft is still obsessed with how much it sucks to be a normal person instead of a wealthy rich commander of a mansion. Also, Lovecraft is grumpy that the modern world looks down on his questionable views. He wishes he lived in an earlier time where – surely – everyone would adore his viewpoint. And Lovecraft is writing his story as a call to arms for all his fellow entitled I-want-to-be-rich why-aren’t-I-rich people.

This just has so many echoes for me of what is going on in our modern world that it makes me unhappy to have to read and re-read his griping. He doesn’t even want a society where he graciously helps every person in his kingdom be happy. He wants a world full of NPCs where he’s the main character and can do and say anything at all that he wants. When he leaves, everyone just pauses and waits for his return.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Here’s the story.

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/c.aspx

My video review of Celephaïs

Amazon KDP and AI Narrators

by Lisa Shea

Amazon’s publishing system is now rolling out main-dashboard-page notices which push authors to use AI to instantly create audiobooks for their books. This is going to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of narrators.

AI was of course built by listening in on all of those existing audiobooks … without compensation to the narrators …

It is a very challenging time to be an author, an artist, or a narrator.

LibGen Pirate Database of Books Generates Meta Facebook AI Project Illegally

by Lisa Shea

In March 2025, many authors realized to their shock that their novels, novellas, short stories, and other works had been stolen by thieves for the LibGen illegal book database. And even worse, the Meta / Facebook team then used that copyright-infringing database to train their new AI program.

Clearly Meta knew this was wrong. According to a report by ArsTechnica, the email messages Meta engineers sent each other show their concern. One such email by research engineer Nikolay Bashlykov in April 2023:

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right … concern about using Meta IP addresses ‘to load through torrents pirate content.'”

If you’re not familiar, ‘torrenting’ in essence means downloading / distributing files using a BitTorrent protocol. It’s how a lot of illegal pirate sites share data.

So, for authors who are new to this world, let’s start back in time a little to explain what is going on here.

Napster / 1999

Back in the early days of the internet, there was Napster. This was a time before easy online music systems. Most people had piles of CDs in their house. Then some pirates / thieves decided to make a giant online illegal database of all those CDs. People around the world loaded their CDs of music into this database. Millions of other people then downloaded the songs for free. This threatened to be the destruction for many musicians’ careers.

A number of musicians banded together and filed lawsuits. In 2001, Napster shut down. Now that demand had been ‘proven’, though, many music-providing sites sprang up and provided a legal way for listeners to easily get music without having to buy hundreds of CDs.

LibGen / 2008

Library Genesis, shortened to LibGen, began in the 1980s in Russia. Over time it grew as more and more thieves added content to it. This database is NOT added to by random social media posts or ChatGPT usage or activities like that. People deliberately add in ebooks they own, to “help” the system be complete. So the database can be fairly hit or miss. If a person likes a specific author, then every single book by that author might be added into the LibGen system. If another author just doesn’t happen to be owned by thieves, that author’s works might not get into the database.

Yes, it is completely illegal to provide these books online for free, just like it was completely illegal for Napster to provide all of those musicians’ CDs online for free. The pirates / thieves don’t care. They enjoy free content. When a lawsuit is filed against them, they just shut down that URL, create a new URL, and their data is live again. The thieves operate in countries where the local police simply don’t take action. Think of how we still get scammer email messages. Clearly those scammer emails are illegal, but the scammers are still operating. They simply set up shop somewhere that law enforcement isn’t shutting them down.

Pretty much every month now action is taken to shut down the current LibGen URL. And then the LibGen people create a new one and pop the database live again. It’s a whack-a-mole game.

Meta Facebook AI Training

So the issue with LibGen has been going on for literally decades. Many authors’ books have been in their system for decades. The authors just never knew because they never went looking to see.

The reason most authors now know about LibGen is because of the Sarah Silverman lawsuit.

July 2023 Sarah Silverman Lawsuit

In July 2023, Sarah Silverman, along with a few other authors, filed a lawsuit against Meta, which is the company which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other companies. Their claim was that Meta had knowingly used this existing decades-old pirate illegal database to train their new AI program.

Then in January 2025 a batch of information from that lawsuit became public which revealed just how cavalier Meta was in their usage of this illegal content database.

https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit

The Atlantic then wrote articles about it. In March 2025 those articles went viral.

The Atlantic Story Series on Meta AI and LibGen

This is how most authors finally realized what had been happening to their books for, in some cases, decades.

So that is where we are now. This pirate database has existed for decades. Meta has been using the LibGen illegal pirate database to train their AI for years. There are multiple class-action lawsuits going through the courts to tackle it.

Can we shut the pirate database down? People have been trying for years. Yes they can shut down a given domain name. That doesn’t stop the thieves from just making a new domain name. Can we put the owners in jail? I’m not sure we even know who the owners are. And if they live somewhere like Russia, good luck in getting anyone in Russia to care.

Can we shut Meta down? We have more luck there. We KNOW who in Meta were sending the email messages about using clearly illegal content to build the new Meta AI software. So it’s a question if Meta can argue that their use of the books was “fair use” for training. This is the exact same argument that many other AI companies are using when training their AI programs on the entire internet of data.

After all, it’s not like any of these AI programs is letting people “read” the original books. The original books are ones of millions used to train an AI program in how to craft coherent sentences. A given AI output string is a mish-mash of all of those millions of books.

One could say the AI companies could have borrowed all of these books from libraries and ingested them all that way. So the end result is the same.

Many authors feel that using library copies would have been the LEGAL way to train AI. To instead source content from a clearly illegal pirated database was the ILLEGAL way to train AI.

And that is where we now stand.

As an author, your main option is to join a class action suit. The US has had one for two years now – that’s what started this all. France and other countries are forming their own.

I would NEVER EVER suggest to authors that they take down or not publish ebooks as a result. Ebooks are CRITICAL for people with vision issues. It is not fair to punish all of those people because thieves exist. Thieves will always exist. Heck, thieves can easily scan paperbacks, too. Google Books is full of scanned paperbacks. So following a paperback-only mindset is only exclusionary.

I would also NEVER EVER suggest to authors that they stop publishing. There have always been thieves. People who are thieves weren’t going to buy your books anyway! This is not a ‘market loss’. Those thieving people exist in their own world. Your fan base is comprised of the people who will buy your books. Period, the end. Invest the time in marketing, so people know your books are out there, and they will be bought, read, and enjoyed!

Sure, always have a copyright statement in your book and add an anti-AI statement. But that’s not going to stop a thief! The thief already knows it’s illegal to steal your book. They’re doing it anyway. Your message isn’t going to stop them. If you want concrete action, the class-action lawsuits are the way.

Ask with any questions!

Image copyright-free from Pixabay

Author Brain Better than AI / ChatGPT

Lisa Shea is Strongly Against the Use of AI / ChatGPT

by Lisa Shea

Someone on Bluesky just accused me of writing my content with ChatGPT because I write so quickly.

I’ve been writing this quickly all my life – DECADES before ChatGPT ever existed. Anyone can go back through my blog and social media posts to see me posting my novellas and short stories as I write them.

I’m a full time author who is dedicated and focused. I practice yoga and meditation to allow me to immerse fully in the flow of writing all day.

It’s disappointing that we real authors putting in serious work are now being denigrated as offloading their work to ChatGPT.

For the past 25+ years, I have posted literally hundreds of thousands of articles, essays, and content pages on my 30+ websites. All of that content, plus my 500+ books, has been hoovered up by ChatGPT and other AI engines to create their systems. Now AI and ChatGPT is actively putting me out of work. I used to make money from my own website traffic and by writing blog articles for third-party websites. All of that has dried up with the arrival of ChatGPT.

So to then have fellow artists and authors degenerate into a baseless witch-hunt attack without even the most basic of research is beyond frustrating.

Practical Compassionate Tips for Helping Others

How to Write your US Representative and US Senator

by Lisa Shea

Did you know that many representatives and senators feel that a mere twenty messages on a topic constitutes an avalanche! It doesn’t take a lot of activity to create an impression! Be a part of that push for change.

It only takes five minutes. All you have to do is go to their website, click the contact link, and send them a message. Let them know your concerns about social security, veteran’s benefits, or whatever else is bothering you.

Here’s how to do it!

The official Congress.gov website is here:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Just type in where you are and it will let you know who represents you in that location.

If you don’t want to put in your address, start at least with your senators. For senators, you can look here:

https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Your state has two state-wide senators who sit in the US Senate. The entire state shares those two senators. All you have to do is click on a state name and it will tell you who those two senators are. You can then click to contact you.

For representatives, it is more specific than that. A given state has a lot of representatives, each representing a region. So you’ll need to tell the system what region you’re in, for it to know which representative handles that region.

If you want to just see all of the representatives for your state, and look through them that way, the main list is here:

https://www.house.gov/representatives

However you find them, bookmark the links to your two senators and your one representative. Write them. Get into the habit of writing them.

Your voice matters!

Here’s my FREE book with a wealth of other ideas. Let me know if you have any suggestions to add to this.

Practical Compassionate Tips for Helping Others
Practical Compassionate Tips for Helping Others

Amazon Vella Episodic Stories by Lisa Shea

by Lisa Shea

Now that the Amazon Vella system is shutting down, a number of you have asked about the status of my Vella episodic stories. I’m converting those Vella stories all over into Amazon Kindle ebook / paperback versions.

Here’s the Vella books I have converted so far as of December 2024. I will aim to keep this list updated as I work through my library.

Citizenchip Reflections – A SciFi AI Epic Adventure on Mars
When a new biodome on Mars is finally ready for operation, a fresh Self is spawned to oversee its operations. But this Self has a path unlike the thousands which have come before.

Citizenchip Reflections on Amazon

…

Humanity – A Modern-Day Inspirational Paranormal Short Story
I had lived in Worcester, Massachusetts for four years while attending Holy Cross, but I still hadn’t gotten fully used to the brutal winters. Then, huddled in a moonlit doorway, I encountered a homeless veteran …

Humanity on Amazon

…

Shielding Secrets – a Cyber Spy Espionage Thriller
The CIA recruited Doctor Melissa Langdon while she was still in grad school. For ten years she delved into the blackness of the dark web, rooting out dangerous terrorists. Through it all, she did whatever it took to maintain anonymity. The impenetrable shield was critical for her young children’s safety.

Shielding Secrets on Amazon

…

Lucian – A Devil Immortal in New York City
Lucian wrings every drop of pleasure out of life. He plays bass guitar in a cavern beneath New York City, savoring the beauty of every shape, size, and color of humanity. There is nothing more he could want from his immortal existence. And then someone walks through the door …

Lucian on Amazon

…

Ishtar – A Celestial Immortal in New York City
Ishtar knew she should stay away from Lucian. Their Celestial families had been at odds since the beginning of time. But somehow, he was able to touch her very soul…

Ishtar on Amazon

…

Crocodile Tears – A Tropical Military Thriller
Five years. For five long years, Adrianna Gillespi has waited to wreak vengeance for her best friend. She has prepared, planned, and trained. At last she is finally stepping foot on the small island Marine base in the lost shadows of the Philippines. At last she can confront the man who destroyed Jackie’s world.

Crocodile Tears on Amazon

…

The Third Ranger – A SciFi Espionage Action Thriller
2040. Violence flares higher as food shortages claw jagged lines between the haves and have-nots. Vic and her two fellow Rangers are a weapon against the chaos. They are inserted where surgical action eases the tension. Bishop and Ledger are the best-of-the-best. But Vic has been trained since birth in a specific skill set. She can control insects with her mind. When Vic’s team is tasked with an objective that goes one step too far, she’s forced to draw a line of her own.

The Third Ranger on Amazon

…

Visions in the Flames of Brasov – A Dark Gothic Medieval Paranormal Short Story
Brasov, Romania ~ 1459. A brutal July heat baked the crowded city. Once again I scoured the fetid alleys, desperately hunting for my naïve eight-year-old brother. He thought he was invincible. At eighteen, I knew that our rancid world was merciless. And my visions rarely lied …

Visions in the Flames of Brasov on Amazon

…

The Butterfly Beneath The Earth – A Dark Gothic Medieval Paranormal Romance Novella
July 1218. Lincoln, England. Constance’s life is finally finding a balance. The older man her parents forced her to marry has died, leaving her a widow. The Lincoln keep is rebuilding after the brutal siege from the French. But just when she thinks her visions are under control, and she can take a breath, Lucan returns from the Crusades.

The Butterfly Beneath the Earth on Amazon

…

The one I’m working on now is The Girl Who Endured, a contemporary paranormal romance about a solitary woman who grows up in rural Vermont and who has visions of a soulmate. She goes on to a ‘Naked and Afraid’ style reality show and holds her own, but doesn’t find anyone who holds a candle to her dreams … This story is at 200 pages / 29 chapters and probably has another quarter of the story to go. If anyone wants to read what I have so far and offer feedback I’m happy to share.

After that is Elizabeth and Charlotte – a lesbian retelling of Pride & Prejudice. That will take me a while because I want to get it just right. I may skip it for now depending on how quickly I think I can work on the remaining ones.

Athena’s Handmaiden – a Historical Coming of Age in Ancient Greece – only four chapters done here. This may end up a short story.

The Girl Who Wasn’t Born – a Paranormal Murder Mystery Romance – I only have 3 chapters done so this will take a while. I’d aim for this to be a novella or novel length.

The Glasscutter’s Daughter – a Steampunk Paranormal Time Travel Romance – I’m only one chapter into this. We’ll see if this just lingers for a while until I get inspired again.

Ask with any questions!

The Music of Erich Zann by H. P. Lovecraft Review and Analysis

The Music of Erich Zann by H. P. Lovecraft Review and Analysis

by Lisa Shea

The Music of Erich Zann by H. P. Lovecraft was written in 1921 and published in 1922. Lovecraft himself really enjoyed this story and it was republished in a number of collections. I think this is my favorite story so far, in the readings I’ve done. I’ve heard from many others that it’s their favorite as well.

Once again we start at the ‘end’ with the main character (nameless) telling us of something that happened when he was in college. I really wish Lovecraft wouldn’t do this. It ruins the suspense for me. We know the student lives. We know nothing momentous happens to the world.

Student is struggling in school, being kicked out of apartments left and right for not paying his rent, and somehow he ends up on a steep, twisting street with twisty houses which dead-ends at a high wall on the top of a hill. This is in a run down industrial part of Paris (or somewhere in France) with factories and smog. It’s the poor part of town. The house the student is in isn’t at the very top of the hill – it’s three houses down – but it’s the tallest by far and as a result the attic space has a window which looks out over the end-of-street wall.

I love the descriptions of the street – for pedestrians only, very run down – and the twisty houses. I love the poor student paired with the elderly musician who lives in the attic. Both are struggling. The student is on the 5th floor and he hears the attic musician playing late at night. The student is intrigued by it and goes up. The musician lets him listen a little, but gets agitated when the student asks the musician to play a more intriguing piece he’d heard a previous night. The musician manages to get the student moved to a lower floor so the student can’t listen in any more.

The student sneaks up at night anyway to listen at the keyhole. One night the student hears wild playing and, worried, starts knocking on the door. The musician lets him in and writes a note (he can’t talk) saying he’ll explain it all.

Then the musician spends AN HOUR STRAIGHT writing an entire novel about the situation. And of course instead of letting the student read page 1 while the musician writes page 2, the student just sits there twiddling his thumbs the entire time. Which of course leads into him never getting to read any of it, because …

Music starts coming from beyond the high window, and the musician immediately starts loudly playing to drown it out. The wind whips up, the windows smash in, and the notes all flutter out the window. Looking out the window, the student only sees blackness. Then the candles blow out, and the student realizes the musician is dead, even though the music is still loudly playing. The student flees for his life.

And after that, the student has never been able to find this street ever again. Nobody has heard of it.

This brings to mind for me the notion of a ‘trap street’ – a fake street created by mapmakers so that if anyone ever copied their entire map the thieves would copy the fake street, too, and be caught by the thievery. Authors do this too – insert a deliberate mistake so that if someone else copied it the mistake would show up.

I love the plot of this. Was the musician trying to drown out the dangerous alien signal because otherwise the signal would destroy listeners’ brains or brainwash them? Or maybe playing opposite music (destructive interference) to neutralize it? If so, why isn’t that elderly musician bringing on someone else to help him? He’s not going to live forever. And the musician does in fact die, so now what? The world didn’t end. Did the alien succeed in his mission? There seems to be no ‘consequence’ to the music duel ending.

I enjoy this one a lot! Lots to keep thinking about!

Read The Music of Erich Zann by H. P. Lovecraft –

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Music_of_Erich_Zann

My video review –