Matt Cowper's Blog

The final novel in the Elites trilogy, Nightfall, has just been released into the Amazon book-universe!

Feast your eyes on the superhero badass epic-ness that is the cover, once again designed by the professional and almost shockingly friendly 187Designz.

With this release, I can now put to rest the sprawling, intense saga of the Elites – for now at least. I have plans for an Elites 2.0 series, but there are other paths I want to march down (or flounder down, while being assaulted by gna...

After writing several superhero novels, I decided it was time to branch out into other genres.

Thus, today’s new release, which is my first foray into the fantasy realm.

I present to you The Shard of Kyl’larbo!

The blurb:

When the darkness comes…

…that means it’s time to fight the darkness.

Cullen was a simple farmboy, harvesting radishes and organic kale alongside his parents, cousins, grandparents, and several others who were either second cousins once removed, or gr...

It’s time to get darker….

Book Two of my Elites series, Rogue Superheroes, blasted onto the Kindle Store recently.

And I am stoked.

Not only for the kickass cover, designed by the incomparable 187Designz.

But also for the story – which, of course, is what it’s all about, right?

Rogue Superheroes continues the tale of the reborn Elites, (allegedly) the world’s greatest superteam.

In Book One, The World Savers, they…well, that would be telling.

Let’s just say that a lot of shit happened...

It’s common for self-published authors to use a Reader Magnet to draw in folks to their Author Platforms.

A Reader Magnet can be a short story, the first few chapters of a full novel, a novella, bonus scenes, and so on.

In exchange for getting this free content, people need only give up their email addresses.

It’s a tried-and-true strategy to build up a mailing list while also hooking readers on your writing — so of course I haven’t created a Magnet until now.

Hey, I never claimed to be a vis...

Today I shut down my Twitter account. Doing so filled me with immense joy.

I’d long contemplated deleting my small corner of the tweet-verse, but I kept limping along, out of an obligation to my Author Platform.

It is said that an author needs a Social Media Presence, so I felt Twitter was mandatory. Millions use the platform, and we’ve become so accustomed to it that we think nothing of writing (or even speaking) in hashtags.

An author who dedicates themselves to Twitter can surely meet new...

In writing circles, a common question is: are you a plotter or a pantser?

For those not up on the lingo, these two terms describe how someone goes about the writing process.

A plotter, as the name suggests, is someone who plots out their work. The style and length of their outlines varies. Some craft broad outlines that just list a few key events, some do chapter-by-chapter summaries. Others break things down even further, so their outline looks more like a nearly-completed story than a rough...

I’ve made a fair number of changes to my Author Platform recently – some of them evident, while others are behind the scenes stuff.

First off: after a million years, it seems, I’ve published a new novel!

Primal Nature is the second novel in the Johnny Wagner, Godlike PI trilogy, and it features all the vivid, wacky characters seen in the first book.

Plus aliens!

As if corrupt government officials and arrogant superheroes weren’t enough, Johnny now has a whole new race of ex...

The two or three people who pay attention to this space have probably noticed that I haven’t been active lately. No blog posts for months, no new releases, only a handful of grumpy tweets. What’s going on with my Author Platform?

Long story short, I’ve been working on a massive personal project this past year, something that had nothing to do with writing. I was going to blog about it, but I’ve decided not to, for privacy reasons, and because the Internet is already full of oversharers.

With...

With the new year upon us, it’s time to look back at 2017, a year that was frequently strange and only occasionally epic. (I feel like every year in America is like this nowadays, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Below is a list of my favorite stuff from the past year, organized in various categories.

Note: this list doesn’t exclusively feature things released in 2017, like many lists. Most of it’s a hodgepodge of stuff I watched/read/experienced for the first time and loved. There are a...

Recently I posted an overview of my skoolie project. I’m still working on it; thank god there isn’t a deadline, or I’d be fired.

Since that post, there have been two big (and expensive) events in skoolie-land that put me several large steps closer to project completion.

First was the installation of a new radiator. When I bought the bus, I knew it had a coolant leak, and planned to fix it if/when I found a qualified bus mechanic. The leak didn’t prevent the bus from running – it did, however,...