Friday, January 21, 2011

Despoiling De Spoiler

As you may recall, I was a tad annoyed that the Amazon product description for my upcoming novel Blood Wounds revealed a major part of the plot of my upcoming novel Blood Wounds. Not that I would have wanted it to reveal a major part of the plot of some other novel, mind you. I simply felt it told more than I wanted potential readers to know.

So I asked my editor to ask whoever needed to be asked to ask someone or something at Amazon (I have no idea if people or robots handle the Amazon busywork) to change the product description. And my editor asked whoever who asked someone or something and indeed, there's a brand new product description with the vital piece of plotting gone, gone forever, until you read Blood Wounds (which, of course, I hope you ultimately will):

Product Description

Willa is lucky. She has a happy family—Mom, Jack, her stepsisters Brooke and Alyssa, and Willa—all living together in peace and contentment. But a frantic phone call from her mother's best friend from her hometown of Pryor, Texas, shatters that calm and stability. Willa's birth father has murdered his second wife and two daughters and the police think he is on his way east to find Willa and her mother.

Questions abound as Willa realizes that her mother has held on to many secrets. As those secrets begin to spill out, Willa is compelled to seek the truth about the family she never knew existed. In dusty Pryor, away from the peaceful home life she’d always known, Willa begins to find her roots and question the meaning of blood ties. Only by looking at all of the pieces that make up her life can Willa discover her strength and independence—and realize what family ties really mean.


My mother always told me it never hurts to ask. In this case, not only was she right, but it didn't even hurt to be answered!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yay about getting the spoiler removed! I asked the Powers that Be to remove my spoilage, but it never happened. Makes me now know that a) it could be done and b) it explains why certain people at this publishing house are no longer with this publishing house.

-Susan

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Hello and sympathies susancolebank-

I was very pleased that my editor honored my request (and did so without any nagging on my part). And I thanked her as soon as I saw it had happened.

Blood Wounds is coming out in the fall, so the vast majority of people who'll stumble into the Amazon listing won't be there for months and months. Even so, the longer the spoiler is there, the more spoiled the whole thing gets!

Anonymous said...

Mother knows best.

And thank the lord for short term memory. I have no idea what the original posting was.

Who am I, anyway.

Oh, wait, I'm... Glen

(By the way, how do your books come out so fast? Doesn't it usually take much longer? Who exactly do you know?)

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Hi Glen, and I know who you are (I can see right through that Anonymous disguise)-

It always feels like forever to me between the time I write a book and the time it gets published. The turnaround on LAWKI was the fastest, at least from the time Harcourt bought it until it came out (roughly a year). Blood Wounds should be closer to a year and a half from the time I finished the first draft until publication date.

In other words, it takes me a lot less time to write a book than it takes the publisher to publish it!

Bethanie said...

Sorry about your jets last night…
Oh, wait, I'm a Steelers fan.

So am I really sorry?

Correct phrase: Sorry that your particular team didn't last.
*Added note: like mine did.

No hard feelings.

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Hi Bethanie-

Not to worry. I like the Steelers also!

Didie said...

Wow... so different from LAWKI world but I will definitely buy it.;P