The first name out of the hat was Joanne Cleary.
The answer was the windows! The Spanish version also used the wrong picture and you can see why my senior editor was apologetic. It is a very lovely rose garden...but somehow I doubt Ivar and Thyre would have seen it. My sr editor knows that the readers of Historical do notice things like that and it does bother her. It is one of the reasons why she is such an excellent senior editor.
The feel of the cover is wonderful (mostly I notice the couple, philistine that I am!) and it does capture the feel of the book. And I do like the new M&B look. I saw the new Historicals out in Tescos yesterday and they were screaming Buy me! Lovely jewel like covers.
In other news:
Today is my workshop in Knaresborough for New Voices. I really hope it goes well and that the people who go enjoy it.
My editor was in touch yesterday. She has okayed my ideas for the second book which is exciting and is looking forward to seeing my partial of the first book in the new contract. I have promised it for next week. It will get there. My editor is lovely and I do like working with her.
5 comments:
Congrats, Jo. I think it's a fantastic cover, Michelle, window, rose-garden and all. :-)
Good luck with your workshop. I'm sure it'll be great.
"I saw the new Historicals out in Tescos yesterday"
You have M&Bs for sale in your Tesco? All the Tescos near me stopped selling them years ago. I wonder if they sell better in some parts of the UK than in others.
They do very well in Tescos, Laura. I know Tesco expanded the space about a year ago. At my Tesco they moved them up and now have returned them to the bottom shelf. At the hypermarket in Newcastle (Kingston Park) they have a large section devoted to M&B.
But Tesco is a key account for M&B and vice versa. Not sure why yours don't carry them.
It's good to know they're available somewhere in shops (as opposed to online). Given the difficulty in finding them in the shops near me, I was getting worried that M&B might be declining in popularity.
Since I was still curious about regional variations, I took myself off to Public Lending Right's lists of most popular titles for each of the "nine government regions for England - plus Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales."
There really is a pretty obvious difference between Scotland and the North East's borrowing in 2008-2009. There seem to be more crime/thriller novels at the top of the Scottish list, Danielle Steel appears at numbers 35, 44 and 90, and Katie Fforde only just squeezes onto the list at number 97. In the North East, Danielle Steel appears at numbers 19, 29, 52, 86 and 93, and Katie Fforde's at 36. Of course, those lists rank children's books alongside the adult books and if more children's books are borrowed in either Scotland or the North East, that might make it less meaningful to compare the rankings of books for adults on the two lists, but in 2007
Jim Parker, the head of the PLR, said: "The Scottish figures are interesting in that they reflect a trend towards crime fiction and a move away from the romantic stories that once dominated the list.
"There does seem to be a preoccupation with grisly crime which features very strongly in the Scottish list. (BBC)
and in
the period from July 2007 to June 2008 [...] Scottish borrowers spurned the Richard and Judy Book Club choices, which dominated the Top 10s in other regions of the UK, in favour of thrillers and crime novels by the likes of US writer Michael Connelly. (BBC)
So it seems to me that there's a trend holding steady over a few years of crime and thrillers doing better than romantic fiction in Scotland. Since I'm in Scotland, maybe that has something to do with the absence of M&Bs in the Tescos near me?
Thanks so much, Michelle! Really looking forward to reading.
Cheers, Jackie!
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