Day job, change in critiques

- Stacy 2 Comments

Just to let you all know: I have found a day job. Yay for paying the bills! Freelancing is great for many things, especially the flexible schedule, but regular work is hard to come by these days.

It’s not a job with a trade publisher (I’m not going to announce here what it is, to keep those things separate), so it won’t conflict with what I’m doing in my freelance life, but what it does mean for you, however, is that I’ll be much, much slower on critiques. I’m suspending any new critiques for now so that I can catch up on the critiques I already have in the queue. I don’t think I’ll be able to take any new critiques until at least October.

I will also want to keep room open in my schedule for working on the small press (another reason this day job is a godsend–once I start taking submissions for the small press, I will be ethically obligated to discontinue paid critiques, and honestly, I’d rather move forward on having the ability to publish people, rather than just give them advice on how to get other people to publish them! 🙂 ). It’s moving forward–I’m still very much in the pre-startup phase, but I should have something to announce next week, so stay tuned.

For those of you waiting on critiques, as always, thanks for your patience. I’m getting them back to people one by one, and if you haven’t yet heard from me you should soon.

Absentee blogger

- Stacy

I’ve been rather absentee from the blog lately. I’ve been working on a number of things–catching up on critiques (for those waiting, thanks for your patience), finding a day job (paying the bills is a good thing!), apartment hunting and then rearranging my apartment to allow for a roommate, and a few other things. I don’t like to talk much about any of those things in detail on the blog–I have tweeted some about some of them, but not much–so I’ve been quiet here and bordering on inane on Twitter/Facebook.

None of those things have been resolved quite yet, either, so I’m probably going to continue to be quiet here for a while. It’s all I can do to just try to get everything done in a day, and then in the evenings I tend to be watching TV or doing similar things to decompress, which is what I’ve been tweeting about recently.

I did read Catching Fire as one of those decompression activities, though, and perhaps later this week I’ll post a review of it, if I get the time. Hopefully by mid-September things will have settled down a bit and I’ll have some news for you.

Videos

- Stacy 3 Comments

Twitter seems to be down, which is a disappointment for the random thoughts I generally send into the ether that way instead of blogging them. I Twitter because I care about you, my blog readers, didn’t you know?

(Though if you’re getting this on Facebook, I suppose that means that you’d see it either way. But anyway…)

I’m working on making a video. I’d say that it’s the first video I’ve ever made, but I actually did help direct the Hallowmere book trailer, so I suppose this would be the second video I’ve ever made that doesn’t involve filming my cats (often the only interesting subject around my house!). But for the Hallowmere trailer, I had the help of several great people at Wizards of the Coast–the books marketing person, Shelly, and the AdCom guy, Adam, and his whole team. We didn’t spend any money on the video, but we had the time and resources of some very talented people.

This time, it’s just me and my little Sony digital camera, so it’ll be an adventure. The raw footage I can get, no problem. It’s the editing that I’m not sure about. I’d like to interview a couple of different people for it, as well as adding text to the video with the people’s names. I have a PC, which came with Windows Movie Maker. Yes, I know, it’s not Final Cut or anything, but here’s a question for those of you who might know: will it be enough to do the simple things I want to do with my video?

I don’t think I’ll even put music on it, because I don’t want to get into trying to figure out royalty-free music. I just want to be able to edit out parts (like the beginning and ends of when I’m recording myself!), splice together a few different pieces of video, and add text. Is that possible with what I have? Or is there a freeware/shareware program out there that might be able to do this?

Read-alikes

- Stacy 3 Comments

I have finally just discovered Diary of a Wimpy Kid Diary of a Wimpy Kid (I know! I had heard of it, but hadn’t read it) and I’m looking for read-alikes. I’m at the local B&N (yay for free wifi!) and their website suggested Dan Gutman’s The Homework Machine, which looks like a lot of fun. I’m looking for books that are popular and well-known among kids (and hopefully their gatekeepers)–the kinds of books that get passed from kid to kid the way Wimpy Kid and Harry Potter and Levin Thumps were. Is Homework Machine one of those (despite the fact that it has many fewer illustrations)? It seems to have had a long shelf-life at B&N at least–it came out in 2007, and here two years later it’s still getting stocked/warehoused in B&Ns in the thousands, which is pretty good for a backlist titles. I’m not talking about something as big as Wimpy Kid, necessarily–just books in the same general fun, illustrated, adventurous genre (realism or fantasy) that have staying power.

So with this in mind, what other books am I missing that are the kind of read for kids ages 7-10, with a concentration on the 8 and 9 year olds that Wimpy Kid really hits on target? It’s an interesting niche, because it hits slightly younger than the all-prose books in the same middle grade section of the bookstore, yet slightly older than the kids reading chapter books like Magic Treehouse.

I doubt we’ll find quite as many books in that range that are as highly illustrated as Wimpy Kid, but I am looking for books with illustrations.

I’m going to start compiling a list of all the suggestions from people in various places (Facebook, Twitter, this blog and its LJ mirror):

  • Supernatural Rubber Chicken by D.L. Garfinkle (except that it’s a chapter book for a slightly younger age, so perhaps it *doesn’t* meet the narrow criteria?)
  • The Homework Machine by Dan Gutman (except that it doesn’t have *as many* illustrations… you get the idea. Let’s be broad for the original list so I can go check the books out and narrow things down)
  • The Dork Diaries
  • Dear Dumb Diary
  • Flat Stanley
  • Ellie McDoodle

The age-old, oft-discussed, oft-annoying discussion: what is the difference between MG and YA?

- Stacy 3 Comments

A conversation came up on Twitter today that moved over to Facebook that covered a lot of ground and I think it would be great to open up the discussion here. It all started because my friend Brandon and I got into yet another discussion about the difference between YA and middle grade, a subject that seems to confuse a lot of people. A lot of misinformation gets spread, especially in the con circuit and SFF community, because it’s this relatively new, hot thing and all the cons feel they need to have something about it, but then we end up with local cons that have four or five panels covering the same old boring topics: four about what the difference between YA and MG is, and one on Harry Potter. They might have thrown up a Twilight panel or two in the last few years.

Years ago I was attending Cascadiacon in Seattle when I had an experience that would illustrate this. The panel had a great NYC editor on it–a NYC editor who worked on adult fantasy books–and several local authors, all of whom wrote for adults, except for one self-published author. The first question the panel had was, “Uh, so, first we should probably define YA, huh?” and they all looked at each other blankly.

I was in the audience–I was there strictly as an attendee, and had only been at Wizards for a few months at that point–and when a few minutes of fumbling comments had passed, I raised my hand. “I’m a children’s book and YA editor. Here’s what YA is for me: books for teens. Readers 12 and up.”

They said they had a new panelist and had me come up to the front.

I tell this story usually because I find it funny that I became an impromptu panelist, but also because it’s frustrating to me how little information there is beyond the children’s book world–or, that is, how little those beyond the children’s book world pay attention to the children’s book industry, and are downright scared of it at times. (All my friends and present company excepted, of course, because they all know better, right? 🙂 ) (When I worked at a B&N in grad school as a bookseller, I got assigned the children’s section by default because everyone else in the store was literally “afraid of it.” I don’t know why; it didn’t bite!)

When “YA” SF award nominees come up, the books could be either middle grade or young adult–Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series, solidly middle grade, was nominated for the 2007 Locus Award, for example. Very seldom do these awards have a “children’s” category, so the YA term becomes the catch-all.

So there’s the backstory to this post, which I’ve edited together from my answers on Facebook to replies to my frustrated tweet earlier today:

Argh. It really bugs me when middle grade books are referred to as “YA.” They’re not! We’re already stretching “young adult” to mean a teen!

People replied asking just what was the delineation, so I replied:

Relatively official delineations in the industry (it might vary by a year or two from publisher to publisher) is MG=ages 8-12, YA=12 and up.

It’s based on developmental levels and/or grade levels.

Author Robison Wells replied to clarify:

Is it that simple that it’s all about ages? I’d always heard that it was based on content, like the number of characters or the inclusion of romance, etc.

To which my reply was (and remember, this is my opinion, and it’s a complicated question; I’m sure entire theses have been written on the subject):

Content follows developmental levels, not the other way around. The reason why there’s not a lot of romance in middle grade is because most *kids* that read it aren’t developmentally into romance. The opposite sex still has cooties, or at least is only puppy love/crushes. Deeper romance in YA happens because those readers are ready for it and interested in it.

To which another author replied with a few questions of her own:

When you say YA is for 12 and up you’re talking about the reader? Correct? because some people say that it is all based on the age of your main character. In that case why wouldn’t Eragon be considered YA? And, do I have to tell the editor whether it’s YA or middle grade?

First, let me attack a couple questions I forgot to address in my long reply to that: Yes, the author needs to tell the editor what age group you see it as, because it helps us to know whether you have a firm enough grasp on the market to be able to place it. However, where you say it is may not be where it ends up. Writers Jessica Day George and Shannon Hale both thought their first books were, respectively, for young adults and for adults (or perhaps both were for YA–I often get Shannon’s part of the story wrong, so go to her site if you want to know more about Goose Girl). Turns out that Jessica’s first book, Dragon Slippers, ended up being marketed as YA even though there’s romance and the character ends up getting married or something (it’s on the TBR pile; I can’t remember exactly the situation) and Shannon’s first book was marketed as YA but now is seen mostly in the middle grade section.

Why? Because of an exception to the rules we’ll discuss: both books were “clean” reads, so they tend to attract a younger audience (and I would hope, a wider range of audience–both books cross over into YA nicely). Those kinds of complicated considerations will be discussed between editor and author on a case-by-case basis, but it’s best for the author to come in knowing the market and having an informed opinion on where you see it fitting the market.

Regarding Eragon as YA–I have always considered it to be YA. Did someone tell you it wasn’t? I’m sure it has middle grade appeal, but as for where it’s marketed, it’s solidly in the teen section of the bookstore.

Now, for some more complicated answers that may even contradict themselves:

Here’s a rule of thumb. Remember, rules of thumb have their exceptions, but for beginning writers especially this rule of thumb can be of guidance, tempered with wide reading in both age groups to get an idea of where your book fits.

When I say that MG is 8-12 and YA is 12 and up, that’s *anticipated* readership. Now, what kids are *actually* reading depends on the kids–there’s some fluidity in the genres because of course a mature, well-read 11-year-old might be ready for a young YA book while a not-so-mature 12-year-old might still be reading middle grade books. And both kids might be reading from both shelves and that’s okay. But a publisher has to pick a category, so we get a feel for it and generally when putting together a variety of factors we’ll come to a conclusion that a given book fits the generalized picture of a middle grade reader or a YA reader (and then we get into younger and older MG and younger and older YA, because there are vast developmental differences between an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old, and even more between a 12-year-old and an 18-year-old. An “edgy” YA might not be appropriate for 13-year-olds but perfect for high school seniors (this is where content comes in).

Okay, so there’s anticipated readers, actual readers, and then there’s the characters themselves. Kids tend to “read up.” In human development terms, we call it “anticipatory socialization.” Think about Ramona the Pest vs. Harry Potter. Some middle grade books are great for the age that the child is at–six-year-olds love Ramona, who also starts out at 6. But Harry is 11 when the book opens, and the first book is targeted at 8-12 year olds. 11 and 12 year olds can read it quite comfortably, and it might be a challenge for some 8-year-olds, but at the same time they love it. Not that they’re going to go off to magic school when they turn 11, but it’s something they can dream about happening to them in a couple years.

So a lot of editors will suggest that you make your protagonist a year or two older than your anticipated reader. Kids older or younger might read and love the book, but think about your reader. And to figure out your anticipated reader, that’s where the content we’ve been talking about comes in–if there’s not a lot of “mature” topics (i.e., think… Read More PG-13 vs. PG or even G–the movie rating system is imperfect, but a good guide, because it takes into account not just language and sex but also violence, dramatic situations, romantic situations (mature romance vs. puppy love), and so forth.

Opinions vary from editor to editor, house to house, agent to agent, but like I said, these are *general guidelines*. Like the Pirate Code.

Let’s throw in a few more complications
Okay, on top of that, here are some questions thrown out by Brandon Sanderson in this discussion for whichI don’t have a definitive answer for (I threw one out in the conversation, but I’m not sure I stand by it, because it’s a good question to consider; if you want to see my thrown-together answers, they’re on my twitter page):

@stacylwhitman Middle Grade wouldn’t fit. Too many characters. Still, I do think the terms are shifting to stick MG into the YA blanket. [in response to me claiming that The Graveyard Book is older MG, not YA]
@stacylwhitman Why? Children’s includes YA. Why can’t YA include MG? It’s all about semantics anyway.
@stacylwhitman Definitions should change to fit the needs of the audience. It’s good to know the difference, but if language shifts…
@stacylwhitman I was talking about readers. Most kids I’ve met and most non-writer adults all use YA to mean Teen and Tween books.
@stacylwhitman Yes, but those same developmental levels use YA to mean 19-40, don’t they? I think that’s the psychological definition.
@stacylwhitman The problem is, everyone defines things differently. Graveyard Book has won MG awards and YA awards. So which is it?

So, oh People of this Industry, where do you stand on this utterly fascinating, earth-shatteringly interesting, way overtalked issue? Do editors have it all wrong because we’re thinking about marketing categories (which, by the way, are mirrored in a majority of children’s and teen libraries)? Should we change our terminology because the audience is using it, or should we just keep correcting them? 😀

I still say it’s the Pirate Code, though.

Writing Excuses hilarity, conferences and conventions for children’s/YA

- Stacy

Today’s Writing Excuses covers conventions you (writers) should be attending, but they didn’t really have time to cover conventions and conferences specifically geared for children’s books (and I actually am not sure if any of them have been to anything except the occasional BYU Writing for Young Readers). I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while, so this sparked me to remember to do this post!

(And remember to go back to Writing Excuses next week, when they talk about what you should be doing at a writing conference/convention.)

Before we get into that, though, I had to share a hypothetical scenario that Brandon and Peter, long-time friends of yore, came up with after I twittered about Dan‘s US cover. My tweets get imported into Facebook, and in answer to this tweet:

I am Not a Serial Killer (and you can too)–friend Dan Wells’s book’s US cover is revealed: http://tinyurl.com/kkfrjx (he’s @johncleaver)

Peter posted this in reply on Facebook:

Well, according to Brandon:

Q: If the gang from Writing Excuses were put in a horror film, obviously Dan would be the killer. But what order do you think everyone would die in? And how would they die? (The victim list includes: you, Howard, Jordan, Pemberly, Stacy, and Peter)

A: Ha! Well, let’s see. If Dan were the killer, I think he’d try to take out Howard first, since Howard is obviously the most dangerous of us all. Though he sees me more often, so he might try to get to me first. I’d put it in this order:… Read More

Howard
Me
Jordo
Peter
Pemberly (he’d leave the women for last because he’s a very gentlemanly killer.)

And then Stacy would take Dan down in a surprise ending. She’d edit him out of the script or something.

So if you know the Writing Excuses guys, watch out for Howard, but perhaps even more, watch out for me!

On to conferences. In the podcast, the guys cover several different types of gatherings that writers might attend: literary conventions, anime conventions, media conventions, conferences and trade-shows. In children’s books, we don’t really have conventions for fans in the same way that fantasy/scifi has conventions (Comic-Con, DragonCon, anime conventions–these are big gatherings where vendors set up booths to sell (or give away) things directly to fans). Though we might consider a parallel to that to be school visits, which aren’t exactly a big thing in adult books.

Trade shows, of course, are the same for both adult and children’s–BEA (Book Expo America, a show for booksellers), ALA (the American Library Association’s annual and midwinter conferences, a trade show for librarians, obviously), IRA (the International Reading Association, a show for teachers, especially elementary teachers), NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English, kind of more of a conference than a trade show compared to the others above, high school English teachers). Obviously, IRA and NCTE tend to attract more children’s and YA books, and of course educational publishing, but there’s some crossover.

In the children’s book community, though, the biggest conferences to be aware of fall under either literary conventions (according to their definitions, though we might call them conferences interchangeably) or conferences (again, according to their defs). Which ones should you be aware of?

Literary conventions

  • SCBWI New York
  • SCBWI Los Angeles
  • Local SCBWI conferences like those hosted by the Seattle, Chicago, Houston, and New England SCBWIs

All of the above are great — and inexpensive — places to attend classes on craft, getting published, and marketing your book, meet guest editors and writers, network with other writers, and all sorts of other beneficial activities. You might meet people who you’ll end up forming a critique group through, or you might discover that a guest editor is looking for something that you write; often editors who work at houses that are closed to unsolicited/unagented submissions are open to submissions for a limited time from conference attendees.

Connected with these things, if you aren’t familiar with the activities hosted by your local Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), you should investigate. Most chapters host a lot more than their yearly conferences–they often have monthly meetings, offer a listserv, have members looking for critique groups online and in person, and man other local resources. You’ll be able to find out information on both the national and local organizations at the link above.

Conferences (aka workshops or seminars)

  • BYU Writing for Young Readers
  • Clarion
  • Chatauqua
  • …I know I’m missing several — what am I forgetting?

It’s getting late, which is why I’m forgetting a lot. I’ll save this post and add to it tomorrow, but in the mean time, feel free to post conferences I’m forgetting in the comments.

Links for the cover issue

- Stacy 1 Comment

Via the Brown Bookshelf, John Green discusses the cover issue for Justine Larbalestier’s book in a thorough way, taking into account all the changes our industry is going through.

***

Also, I’ve added several books to my POC booklist thanks to all the people who have been suggesting books. There are a number of fantasy books by or about people of color that I’ve never seen before, including new books just coming out this year. One that just came out last month, Libyrinth, features a black girl right there on the cover (which we have found in the recent discussions is really rare in YA and children’s, especially in fantasy) and sounds like a really good read, so perhaps for those of you looking to read and review books for Color Online’s Color Me Brown book review challenge, you might want to check it out.

I’ll be looking for it myself. I tend not to read new books when they’re new, so here’s me trying to catch up yet again! I am in the middle of reading Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit and need to get back to Where the Mountain Meets the Moon so I think I’ll be meeting that challenge myself. I’ve got plenty of other books on my TBR list now with the booklist to reach the needed more than three reviews. The only question is whether I’ll have enough time to finish these in the month of August, given all the other things on my plate right now. Even if I don’t meet the challenge for prizes (and yes, there are prizes, so you guys should try for it!), I definitely will try to meet it to get myself to review books on a more regular basis.

Questions I have about our industry in general

- Stacy 3 Comments

I added these to my last post, because some readers pointed out that it sounded like I was defending Bloomsbury’s choice of cover, which wasn’t my intent at all. In fact, I was trying to point out that despite pressures from sales and marketing, the fact remains that it is very important to be aware that if you’ve got a person of color main character in the book and you want a person on the cover of the book (as opposed to a striking symbol, which is a current cover trend), you really have to make sure that the character represented on the cover actually matches the character described in the book. Heck, it’s important all around, no matter whether the character is a person of color or not. If the character in the book is a white blonde girl, don’t make her a redheaded Asian man on the cover, any more than vice versa. But it’s especially important to think about, given our industry’s history of whitewashing covers, when the character is a person of color.

So here are some questions that arose in my mind as I’ve been reading over the articles and discussion of the Liar cover:

Questions I’d love to hear addressed from the publishing end of things:

1. I’ve had authors tell me that their houses (houses I have not worked with) have asked them to change their characters from black to white because of this very myth that “black books don’t sell” or that it forces a book into a niche for only black readers (a myth that I personally think is bunk). Why do marketing departments say this, and therefore why does this pressure on editors, especially in fantasy, exist?

I never got that kind of pressure at Mirrorstone. Our marketing department was completely excited about Star Sisterz — a series that featured several different girls of various ethnic backgrounds as the rotating main characters, including a Jewish girl, an Indian-American, a black girl, and a Latina — and Hallowmere, which featured a white main character to start with in the first three books, but then split up to the French girl, the Hungarian girl, the Irish girl, the black girl who was formerly a slave (remember, this is post-Civil War Virginia), and a Hopi girl was going to be introduced in book 8, a character Mara (the former slave) was going to meet on her journeys.

I was excited about this series, and never really got any kind of pushback from the market on either Star Sisterz or Hallowmere from library shows or IRA–in fact, the librarians we talked to snapped up those books, knowing their readers would *love* them. Why is there this pressure in (at least certain) NY houses over a myth that simply isn’t true? And how do those environments differ from houses where they seem to welcome diversity in both covers and content (books edited by Alvina Ling and Cheryl Klein come to mind)?

2. (Somehow, this question disappeared from my previous post. Argh!!) Even with this pressure from sales and marketing, why do others give in to the pressure, rather than focusing on re-educating the marketing people? I could probably answer this one: because the marketing and sales people are worried that the biggest buyers will shelve the books in the wrong place in the bookstore (a complaint that is lodged multiple times in the comments to Justine’s post about her cover). Again, I don’t know what conversations went on behind the scenes at Bloomsbury, or why this cover would be decided on despite how they must have known it would have been received. I can believe that they thought that making the cover a “lie” — i.e., as if the character had put a picture of someone else on the cover, not herself — might have been part of the discussion, but it obviously doesn’t work for readers in the intended way, if so.

I’ve also had local booksellers here in Utah tell me that “my customers are as white as you are, and they’re not interested in multicultural literature” when I would mention that I was in the process of starting a small press focusing on multicultural fantasy and SF for YA/children. But I don’t believe that’s true regarding the readers themselves, and it ends up being a self-perpetuating cycle that leaves out a huge proportion of the population that probably avoid that store because they can never find books that either 1) they can identify with themselves or 2) in which they can read about other people not like themselves, if they’re white-bread Utahns. Honestly, the proportion of Latinos, black people, Asians, and Polynesians in Utah is pretty strong and steadily growing, so I think it’s ignorant of historically white communities to ignore the growing diversity right in front of them.

So how can we show the whole chain, from booksellers on back to publishing houses, that the readers are there if they’d just acknowledge them?

3. This relates to the questions raised last week about letting our boys be book bigots, but in this case, I think it’s more decisions made on the parts of adults prior to the books getting into the hands of young readers. Have we ever done any kind of market research (even if it’s just a survey to librarians) about what readers like to read about? (Actually — we did such a survey at some point at Wizards.) I’m pretty sure that most middle grade and YA readers across a wide range of communities would count action, adventure, mystery, romance, fantastic magic, and other story elements way above the race of the character, except that they’d probably like to see more diversity, because exploring the world of the character is a fun thing for most readers. I’d love to see PW or some other independent body publish something on this–or to see an academic study on readership.

Cover art considerations

- Stacy 2 Comments

Justine Larbalestier’s new book, Liar, has been getting a lot of attention lately. When she first revealed the cover, I thought it was nice — striking image, interesting thing happening with the hair. But having never read the book, I didn’t realize that the main character describes herself as black, with short hair, and looking like a boy. So as you can imagine, with a cover like this, some controversy has erupted, starting with Editorial Anonymous. Publisher’s Weekly covered it today in their Children’s Bookshelf. And then the author came out with her response.

This discussion fascinates me from the editorial end. ETA: The reason why it fascinates me is not because I’m excusing what went on on the Bloomsbury end–either way, the end result was that the cover photo didn’t remotely represent the character. The reason the discussion fascinates me is that as an editor, I try to pay close attention to these things, making sure covers that feature the character match the character (see anecdote below on a time I screwed that up), and it’s an important subject that needs to be discussed. I just figured I was late to the party on something like this, given how so many people I know in publishing feel so strongly about diversity.

I’m not sure what was happening behind the scenes at Bloomsbury —  the editor commented to Publisher’s Weekly that the cover itself was intended to be a lie — but I do know how tough it can be for an editor to get the cover exactly right, something that will fit the contents of the book and sell the book to readers. After all, despite the maxim, many people do judge books by their covers, and the editor (in partnership with the art department) has to take the feedback of all the stakeholders like marketing and sales, to make sure that book buyers will love it, so that the book will get onto bookstore shelves, before readers even get a chance to see the book.

This controversy reminds me tangentially of why as an editor, when doing cover orders, I strive to make sure to accurately describe the character if that person will be on the cover (obviously, that’s moot when the cover depicts something else, like a symbol; other considerations are at work then). The reason that I work so hard at it is because of an incident early in my career, which was thankfully fixable before the book went to print, but embarrassing for me nonetheless. Vinod Rams is the excellent artist who illustrated all of the Dragonlance: The New Adventures covers and the Dragon Codex covers. He did a brilliant job with the cover of The Wayward Wizard, a now out-of-print book that kicked off Jeff Sampson’s Suncatcher Trilogy. (It’s SO good, and it’s so hard to find the first book that even I don’t have a copy, because I gave away my copy only to realize we couldn’t order more. Now they’re going for over $100 a piece on Amazon and Ebay).

The only problem? I had forgotten to specify in the art order that the friend Sindri meets in this book, Tayt, had copper-colored skin. Humans are all sorts of hues in Dragonlance, but many of the human characters are white, so it was something that Jeff had done specifically to diversify the story. Of course, in Dragonlance there are no “African Americans” or “Asians” because we’re in a fantasy world — wayward-wizardracial issues in Dragonlance tend to cut across human/dwarf/kender/elf/ogre/goblin/gnome lines rather than skin color — but Jeff had pictured her as looking somewhat like an average African American girl (I’m sure he had a specific picture in his head). In the art order, I included all sorts of details about her: she had close-cropped hair, she was lithe and slim and short for a human (though taller than Sindri, who is a kender — a halfling in Dragonlance) and the color of her eyes. But I forgot to specify her skin color! When we got the artwork back, it was lovely–but Jeff told me that Tayt was all wrong.

I was mortified–we couldn’t go back and change a finished painting. It would take too much time, and because of the nature of the mediums Vinod works in, it would require a whole new painting, which would not be in the budget. What could we do?

Well, the art department saved the day. They were able to alter her skin to be closer to the tone the author had imagined. Or at least, it worked for me–her skin was described in the text as the color of copper, if I remember right. She’s gorgeous, though I still worry that she wasn’t quite as Jeff had imagined. And I don’t blame him; it’s completely my fault that I didn’t pay enough attention to detail to make sure that I specified more about how she was supposed to look. ETA: Jeff tells me in the comments on my LJ that I was actually the one who caught it. I didn’t remember it that way at all! And he says he thinks Tayt looks perfect. So I’m even more glad that it all worked out!

I feel for Justine as she fields the controversy over her book, because as Jeff could testify, authors rarely have control over their books (most editors, myself included, ask authors for cover suggestions, but usually character descriptions aren’t part of this process because we generally already have those details in the book itself, as I did with The Wayward Wizard). As I said above, I have no idea what went on behind the scenes at Bloomsbury in deciding upon the cover; I won’t comment on that. I just know that it’s tough making sure that all the people with a say in the cover are happy (including everyone from big book buyers like B&N, who often will say that they’d buy more of a certain book if the publisher did thus-and-such with the cover, to the sales & marketing people, not to mention the author and the editor). I’ll be very interested to see how this conversation plays out over time.

ETA: Questions I’d love to hear addressed from the publishing end of things: I deleted the questions here, because they’re incomplete and it was making the entry wayyy long–see my next post for them.