prized
On the Horizon
My editor sent me a dust jacket of PRIZED. I wrapped it around a copy of BIRTHMARKED to see how it looks. Not bad!
It hit me this weekend that Prized is coming out in a month. I’m happy about that, curious and a little anxious, too. The stakes feel higher with the second book because more people are interested in the trilogy now than when Birthmarked came out, and the potential to delight or disappoint is proportionately magnified. I’m depending more than ever on the team… Continue reading
More on Covers
A month from now when Prized comes out in the U.S., it’s also coming out in the U.K., Australia and La France. I find it cool that the covers are all different, and that the cover artists for each country not only designed one cover, but clearly planned for the subsequent covers to evolve through the series. They had to do this before the books were even written. That boggles my mind.
My editor and I have recently been discussing cover art concepts for Promised, the… Continue reading
Seeking a Small, Fictional Town
Like a lot of us in rural New England, I come from a small town where we value our farmer’s markets, town festivals, and libraries. People think we’re not as friendly as Southerners, or as wholesome as Midwesterners, or as laidback as our counterparts in the West, but just as they don’t all match their stereotypes, we New Englanders are not all brainy, aloof types.
I sometimes wonder how much a writer’s place of living has to do with what she writes. I don’t mean just scenic details… Continue reading
Prized Cover in the UK
The Amazon.co.uk site has uploaded the cover for Prized, which will be published by Simon & Schuster Children’s Books in the United Kingdom and Australia in November, just a couple days after it will be released in the U.S.
In case you can’t read the tag line, it says “In a world where an innocent kiss is a crime, deciding who to love will cost more than your heart.” Clever. I did not come up with that, incidentally.
Here are the two UK covers so far… Continue reading
Cover Reveal: Prized (Birthmarked #2)
Take a look!
Here’s the cover of Prized, the sequel to Birthmarked, which is due out November 8, 2011. April Ward at Macmillan worked with Tim Green of faceout studio on the design, which I think is fantastic. If it seems like a departure from the first book in the series, take a look at what has been done for the paperback of Birthmarked, due out in October.
Pretty sweet, huh?
Behind the Scenes: From Copyedits to First Pass Pages
After I finished going through the copyedits of Prized, I emailed the manuscript back to my editor Nancy Mercado at Roaring Brook in mid-December. The next step was a series of emails we had in early January, when Nan checked back with me about a few of my changes and other things she’d noticed, like whether a character would be called by his first or last name in a particular line of dialogue. Here’s another example, with my reply in italics:
Pg 153 “She might be too… Continue reading