Posts Tagged ‘harpercollins’

I think every author suffers from Fraud Syndrome at some point.  Symptoms include pinching self, wondering if anyone will find out that on the inside you’re a disastrous, precarious and insecure wreck even though you have it semi-together professionally.  Well, at least I hope every author does, because otherwise I just outed myself.

Still, sometimes news arrives to sweeten the pot.  Yesterday I found out that Italian rights to The Heroine’s Bookshelf have been sold to Orme!

As I plot the Italian adventures of a book that used to be just me and a blinking cursor, I’ve been keeping (very) busy.  I guest blogged for Jesaka Long on roller derby and work/writing balance, and I even contributed a Little Women-themed page to GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix.

What’s keeping your mind in the good life these days?

So…I got my cover yesterday.  *runs around in circles like a crazy woman*  It is PERFECT.  And it is all the more perfect because of its evolution.

Let’s go back to some time last year…my editor asked me if I had any ideas for covers and I faltered.  I told her I LOVE the Penguin Classics series even though the silhouettes aren’t quite representative of the stories within.  She agreed that they’re great and instructed the designer to do girly, with a hint of nostalgia.  The first draft is to your left (click for larger version):

As you can see, the color and aging are TO DIE FOR.  But after talking to my agent, I wondered if it wasn’t a bit too nostalgic.  Part of the point of The Heroine’s Bookshelf is that these books are relevant today, and we worried that it might be skewing a bit to the über-reflective side without meaning to.

Luckily, my editor is a peach.  She not only listened to our reservations, but actively solicited our feedback.

Cue more waiting.  Much more waiting.  I began to dread the worst (though no news apparently is good news…)  And then, yesterday, this arrived in my inbox (lower right; click for swoonworthy detail):

Is it not just to die for?  I love the fact that it’s girly without a trace of pink…that the linen texture evokes nostalgia while somehow seeming fresh in its contemporary silhouette frame.  I love the colors and how they’ll pop off the shelf.  I LOVE IT.  My agent immediately wrote and asked if I liked it…I wrote back “I am sitting here clapping my hands and crying.  So…yes.”

It’s so interesting to see the ways in which the second cover retained some of the feel of the original one, including the blue and nostalgic detail, while coming completely into the now.

I’ve imagined how my name would look on the cover of my first book since I was old enough to read…now thanks to my extremely able and efficient team at Harper and to the extremely talented Christine Van Bree, my wildest dreams have been satisfied and surpassed.  After hearing so many horror stories of writers whose covers have felt like a violation or a messy afterthought, I feel doubly blessed…and I hope my readers will like it as much as I do.

Just got word that I can announce something that’s put an extra spring in my step for about a week now.  The Heroine’s Bookshelf has sold in South Korea!

It will be translated and published by Minumin at some point (I’m thinking in 2010) and I’ll have the pleasure of seeing my book in an alphabet and language I have no hope of ever understanding!  Naturally, I am over the moon…and very grateful to the fabulous and hard-working people at HarperCollins who made the sale.

There’s still time to enter the Lorelei King Audiobook Giveaway…in fact, I’d like to beg you to do so!  Details below:

Lorelei King Tallgrass Contest

To celebrate my recent interview with audiobook superstar Lorelei King and to give readers access to a great heroine book, I’m giving away one copy of Lorelei’s Audy and Audiophile Award-winning reading of Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass, a poignant story of the Japanese-American internment of the 1940s as told through the eyes of a young girl.  Here’s how to enter:  click here and leave a comment on this blog post telling who you’d have voice your favorite heroine (voice actress, actress, friend, mom…just make sure to identify her!) and why.  Comment with a link to your tweet, blog post, or Facebook “share with friends” about the contest and I’ll enter you twice! I’ll choose the winner at random at close of business this Friday, April 2.  Contest is open to United States, Canadian, and U.K. residents only.  Good luck!

Yay!  I can finally talk about something that definitely put an extra spring in my step last week.  Harper sold the audio rights for The Heroine’s Bookshelf to Blackstone Audio, the country’s largest independent producer of audiobooks!  This means that THB will be appearing in DRM-free CD and MP3 form in November…and that I get an inside view on the process of how a book gets from the page to the ear.

Here’s the deal report from PM *beam*:

March 5, 2010:  Audio rights
Erin Blakemore’s THE HEROINE’S BOOKSHELF, a look at literature’s greatest and most enduring female characters — such as Jo March, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Laura Ingalls and others — and their authors, who have helped shape the inner lives of generations of women, teasing out universal tenets of strength, wisdom, and survival, to Blackstone Audio, for publication in November 2010, by Janice Suguitan at Harper.

It’s Friday, and my Google Image Search obsession is as strong as ever.  Since Friday is a day for fun, I hereby bring you the first in a series of Friday blogs about covers of books included in The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  First installment:  Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, originally published in 1813.  Click to enlarge these gems!

From left to right, top to bottom:

1)  First, a bit of history.  Here’s the original front page (they didn’t do fancy artsy covers in the early 1800s).

2)  is kind of a swinging late 60sish take on P&P (reminds me of the exquisite Fairy Alphabet on Sesame Street).

3) has to be in the running for Lamest Cover Ever, right?

4) This illustration by Reuben Toledo brings a bit of fashion to Meryton.

5) and 6) Marvel recently put out a comic version of P&P that deserves two postings for its amazing covers by Sonny Liew.  I’ve included the first cover and the fourth.  Make sure to click to enlarge…they’re exquisite. 

7) Harper recently released a version of P&P styled after the Sparkly Vampire Series That Cannot Be Named…eek!

For another cool roundup of P&P covers, check out Belle of the Books’ recent post, which features tons of international Pride and Prejudice flava.

I have of course neglected to post the many, many covers that include a classic portrait of a woman on them.  Zzz.  What’s your favorite of these covers?  Got a favorite P&P cover you’d like to share?

Publishing a book is a saga, though I’d never presume to think it’s as exciting as the lives of the women writers I’m writing about (how very meta).  I just received a very incisive and encouraging revision letter from my editor at HarperCollins and as I go through the manuscript, adding layers and clarifying, I am reminded that the ability and opportunity to revise is in and of itself a blessing.

Think I’m being cheesy?  Just think of Louisa May Alcott, tart author of Little Women and other beloved girls’ classics, and the hurried way in which she had to write her books.  She was so busy sewing, going out as a servant, and caring for her impoverished family that she never had much time for revision.  In a way, though, much of her literary work was revision: editing out (sometimes ineffectively) her frustration over her ongoing poverty, her family’s crushing expectations, and her never-met ambitions.  Writing is rewriting, and Louy spent much time rewriting herself into something more socially acceptable than the clumsy, sarcastic, workaholic who was just as compelling as any of her heroines.

…[Jo] read several liberal offers from budding magazines for her to edit them gratis; one long letter from a young girl inconsolable because her favourite hero died, and ‘would dear Mrs Bhaer rewrite the tale, and make it end good?’ another from an irate boy denied an autograph, who darkly foretold financial ruin and loss of favour if she did not send him and all other fellows who asked autographs, photographs, and auto-biographical sketches; a minister wished to know her religion; and an undecided maiden asked which of her two lovers she should marry. These samples will suffice to show a few of the claims made on a busy woman’s time, and make my readers pardon Mrs Jo if she did not carefully reply to all.

- Louisa May Alcott, Jo’s Boys

Think I’m giving an awful lot of screen space to Miss Alcott these days?  Yup.  I’ll admit it:  my interest in the woman who gave us Jo March has become somewhat of an obsession.  I’ll stop now lest I expose too much of my nerdiness up front.