- Kathryn in the City -- a create-your-own adventure, available May 22, 2003
- The Classics Professor -- a create-your-own adventure (story by Mike Hemmingson, written by me), available May 22, 2003
I know, I know, I should…
I know, I know, I should go to bed. I'm going...but first, I had to be a little compulsive about publicity, and add these images and links to my main page:
I still like “choose your own adventure” better than “create your own erotic fantasy”, but I suppose it’s trademarked. Anyway, the photography is uninspired but the overall layout is lovely. Books!
Yah, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure is trademarked (and for children’s books!), or we’d have loved to have used it. What can you do?
I don’t know what it is about the covers that bugs me, exactly, but somehow they just look kind of old and dusty to me, with a seventies air to them. Which might have been what they were going for, but it’s not my favorite style in the world. I doubt I’d pick them up, if I were browsing in a store. That’s what bugs me, even if I don’t have the artistic skills to tell you exactly why that would be.
Stupid question from outside the publishing world: What determines whose name ends up on the cover? In a “story by X, written by Y”, I don’t have a good intuition about who ought to; maybe both? In ghost-written autobiographies, isn’t it usually “Famous Celebrity and (or with) Actual Author”?
I was just surprised not to see your name on the cover of Classics Professor, hmph.
One other random question: Do you know whether there’ll be a mass-market paperback edition? (Do authors (and editors and publishers) care which edition you buy?)
Not actually a stupid question — it’s all rather confusing, even from within the publishing world. 🙂
a) that’s a preliminary cover; I think the final cover will likely have my name in big letters and perhaps Michael’s in small letters; Amazon is still listing the book as by Michael, but I think that will change at some point
b) as for who determines whose name ends up on the cover — basically, the publisher, though they did ask me if I had a preference; I suppose it’s something an author can negotiate in a contract. I have no problem with having Michael’s name on there too, since he did come up with the original storyline, and I was just brought in at the end.
c) I doubt there’ll be a different edition; I don’t think Melcher generally does varied editions. So just the trade paperback.
d) And yes, authors and editors and publishers definitely care. The more people are willing to shell out for the more expensive editions (hardcover, then trade paper), the more the publisher sees the author as a viable commodity, and the more likely they are to contract with them for more books, and to risk higher print runs of their books.
Well, here’s what *I* don’t like about the cover of _Kathryn_: it doesn’t fit the mood of your exuberantly branching story at all. Instead, it’s very static, formal, posed. It doesn’t help that the words “create your own” are almost smothered by the giant “erotic.” 🙂
Yah. Originally I’d hoped they’d do something more cartoonish — a figure of a woman in colored pencils, with little lines going to various paths, with another image at the end of each path. It would have been fun, I think. Melcher was thinking along the same lines, but Penguin thought that something that was more evidently erotica would sell better. They might be right. I dunno.
You folks should’ve heard the clerk at the bookstore the other week when Mary Anne asked about the book. She asked if they had Kathryn in the City, the guy looked it up in his computer and said something like, “Kathryn in the City, create your own hmm hmm” and started looking a little embarrassed, like he was thinking that whoever had told Mary Anne about this book probably hadn’t told her what it really was and he wasn’t sure how to explain it to her….