As anyone who is familiar with publishing can tell you, the road from draft to publication is often not a smooth one. I thought, when I was signing with Inimitable Books after very few rejections of my debut novel, that perhaps I was one of the lucky ones.
Now please don't get me wrong, I have loved working with Zara and Inimitable Books, but we're a small publisher, and growing pains had to happen if we were going to get out in the world.
So in comes our road bumps. In order to access better resources for the company, Zara agreed to partner with a more established press. (You can see the press release here https://inimitable.pub/UlyssesPWAnnouncement ) This meant we'd be switching from a print-on-demand model for our books and start having print runs. The possibilities felt endless. THE LEGIONNAIRE could be stores, book boxes, magazines and so much more. If I was okay with pushing the release date back to September 5th.
This might seem like it should be an easy decision, but for me I was torn. I loved my release date, and I am not very good at change. I had already planned my "two months to release" post that was meant to be coming out the next day, and now that release would be moving back another 3 months.
In exchange for everything I was going to gain, I made the decision to postpone the release, cried about it a little, and then kept moving.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the only bump this merger meant for THE LEGIONNAIRE. Because this change meant we were going to be running print runs and selling in stores, we couldn't classify it as NA, because there wouldn't be a place on the shelf for it. THE LEGIONNAIRE was now going to be classified as an adult book, at least for the purpose of shelving it in stores.
But this meant that our producers no longer believed the original cover was appropriate for the genre, and we were going to need to come up with something new. I was absolutely devastated, I love the cover Keylin made for me. And to make matters worse, there was pressure coming from above Zara and I to put a cover developed by AI on THE LEGIONNAIRE.
I do not believe AI belongs anywhere in art. If we want to automate systems to make human life easier couldn't we have started with something mundane like doing the laundry? Artwork is meant for humans, but because we had such a short deadline, we were told this would be the best bang for our buck in changing the cover.
To make a long story short, with the support of Zara as my publisher I refused to put an AI cover on my book. I was worried this might be the end of this publication tale, or at least a very long pause while I found somewhere else to publish it, but Zara fought for me, and together we spent hours researching and asking around until we could find a new artist to illustrate the cover.
It was a very stressful few days to say the least, but I look forward to sharing that new cover with you in the coming weeks. And if you are in the position to do so, I urge you to go support artists out there doing the challenging and beautiful work of bringing our characters to life, because the world would be a lot less colorful without them.
So now, THE LEGIONNAIRE will actually be coming out October 3rd, with its new cover (the extra month was meant to give my book it's best chance of getting in stores, so that's why it's not in September), and I have a big favor to ask you.
If you've already preordered my book, thank you so very much from the bottom of my heart for supporting my dream. But your preorder should be getting cancelled from wherever you bought it from, as we transition to the newer version of the book. So I'm going to have to ask you once again to go out there and show THE LEGIONNAIRE your love. I'll be updating social media once it's available for preorder again.