Calm Prevails

I've done what I can to try and fix the mess. It's now in the hands of the powers that be, and what happens from here is up to them. Outlook: not so good, but all hope has not yet been abandoned.

This is not my first publication disaster, and I kinda doubt it will be my last.

You have to let go of so much when you sell your work. You must trust the people publishing it to turn out a quality product. You can help along the way but once the book is copy-edited, it's basically out of the author's hands. Most of the time, I think the publishers do a good job.

No matter what quality of work they do, however, the reader doesn't think about them. The reader doesn't know them. The author is held solely accountable for the end product, because the author's name is the only one on the cover. When the reader wants to point a finger, it's always at the author.

True story: A colleague of mine in the romance genre once had a cover that depicted the hero of her story as an identical twin of the Pillsbury DoughBoy. Seriously. Her cover was the most hideous I've ever seen in the genre (and this includes the infamous three-armed heroine from that Christina Dodd historical.)

My colleague, a consummate professional, ordered several hundred bright yellow smiley face stickers. She then passed them out at every convention with instructions to stick them over the hero's head on the offending cover. The readers absolutely loved the idea.

I'm calm. You can weep and tear your hair out, or you can move on; I'd rather move on. But if anyone knows where I can get several thousand 3" X 5" smiley face stickers . . .