Almost there!
I’ve heard from my publisher. The Guilty is back from layout and looking good. If they can settle on a cover, it will drop on May 15th.
It’s not too much of an overstatement to say that The Guilty has had the most challenging road to publication of anything I’ve ever written. Not only did I sweat over the thing for months and months back in the early 2000s, but it hit pretty much every publisher you could think of and got the most frustrating editorial responses.
“We love it, but we don’t know how to sell it,” is how the editors almost uniformly replied. They couldn’t grasp the idea of the Holocaust mixed with Gothic storytelling or ghosts, and that was all it took for them to pass. Never mind that someone else would like it if they liked it, too. A story must only be engaging. And if there’s no easy classification for that story, then make a new classification. It’s ridiculous to think that there are writers whose work is being rejected at this very moment because some editor can’t decide which label to put on the spine.
Oh, no. Where will Barnes & Noble shelve it!? I’m sorry, but we can’t move forward.
Look, I’m not saying The Guilty exceeds all expectations and breaks all the rules, but it’s a good example of how the industry needs to learn from itself what its flaws are. Concentrate on releasing quality work, not how it’s marketed.