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Blogs by Robert W. Walker
Title Fights - Crime Fiction Behind the Scenes
3/22/2008 9:22:09 AM
What some authors have to do to get their titles on thier covers.
Thanks for the kind words on the "essay on rejection" up at www.AcmeAuthorsLink.blogspot.com my friends, and glad to hear it gave you some solace. I cannot tell you how often I have written spleen-venting letters to my editor to NEVER send them. Most of my spleen-venting to my agents over the years have been over the phone. Careful of what you put in writing. I have a letter on my computer addressed to my editor at HP that is a bitch fest of all the things they might've, could've, should've done to make my books bestseller fodder but failed to do. It is pointless to send it, and it would only convince the editor to work with any other author aka jerk than this one.
Hard lessons, hard won. I once called my editor to bitch, moan, and complain -- this one a guy at Berkley--that I'd gotten my manuscript back from the line editor and the manuscript LITERALLY STANK of cigarette smoke, so strongly in fact that I had to work with it outdoors rather than indoors. John at that point halted me and said, "Rob, the cigarette smoke came from my time with the script." Oops...sorry. Not too big a deal as John and I were on very good terms.
But another time, when my title for a horror-suspense-police procedural was changed from ABADDON, the name of the creature from Revelation if you recall to Salem's Child, I had a hissy fit and let my publicist have it at Leisure Bks.
But perhaps the worst time was when a Zebra editor retitled my FLOATERS to the stupid ass title of Dead Man's Float. I pictured a dead guy trying to get back up on his float; pictured a kid's lesson in a pool but not a Floater per say. At any rate, I called up my then editor and reamed her out over it, and she made the mistake, I guess, of "siding with me" and telling me all was not lost completely as the word Float at least got in. I began to lambast the "invisible offender" who could come up with such a STUPID ignorant title, and I did not get too far when this young lady named Wendy replied, "All right, Robert, it was my idea and my title."
A couple of months after Dead Man's Float appeared and disappeared on bookstore shelves in the early eighties--a terrific read, I might add--Joseph Wambaugh came out with his book with my title on it -- FLOATERS. Cripse!
I have many, too many cover art bouts to tell you about as well. These all I lump into a category called Title Fights. I'd love to do a tell all panel at a conference entitled Title Fights but it seems such stories are too depressing.
Thomas Nelson came out with a book with a fantastically lovely cover, quite dark for a religious horror novel and blazoned across it was ABADDON. I saw it at a book con and walked it over to my publicist at Leisure and shoved it in his face and said, Mr. Littel -- yes, his name was lie tell -- here is what should've been our cover! Two gargoyles on a Church with ABADDON emblazoned across the top; instead, I got a GREEN-eyed, red-haired kid on the cover surrounded by phantasmgoriphic eyes and spirits surrounding the frightened child. S.H.I. T!
Rob *de loser in all dis" Walker
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March 2008 Blogs
• Title Fights - Crime Fiction Behind the Scenes - Saturday, March 22, 2008
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