My Life In Fandom: What The Hell Am I (Not) Looking At?

This is something so bizarre that I have to make a post about it here.

As I noted the other day at the Study, I'm taking this whole independent author thing seriously. So when I listen to Nick Cole and Jason Anspach talk about the importance of having the right cover for your book--that it must tell the reader, at a glance, that your book is This Specific Thing--I immediately went to Amazon and looked over the niches where the big authors in Space Opera roam like the apex predators of the age.

Uh, what.

My criticisms in detail I will save for a future post at the Study, but for now I want to point out the following:

• A distinct lack of man-sized beam swords. East OR West, I saw one cover that wasn't Star Wars have such a figure.
• The mecha depicted are distinctly following BattleTech's lead in their original mechs. We're deep into the Real Robot end, where we're more in the Walking Tank than the Giant-Sized Soldier model of design.
• Space warships are routinely in the Technoform Box model, aping Battlestar Galactica more often than not.
• You never saw a cover with a space battleship, a giant robot, and a guy wielding a beam sword.

It's the last one that really got me. Not from trad-pub. Not from indies. Not from Western outlets. Not from Eastern ones. No one's ever made that mix on a cover. Yes, even after looking at games and movies and so on. No one's done it. After all of the elements that would go into Space Opera and its Planetary Romance predecessor, no one's mixed those things together. We haven't even seen ship plus mech plus swordman, and that means Aura Battler Dunbine never did it despite having all three. (The ship on a technicality, but still.)

Hell, I thought Palladium might have blundered into it. Nope.

It feels so petty to admit this, but knowing that no one's ever done this before gives me even more energy to see this writing project through- and on that I'll have an announcement on the Study come Friday, so watch that space.