I love Mara Lubell. She takes my ideas and shows me what they look like.
Three years ago, Bob Mayer and I started a writing partnership that we wanted people to know was a real partnership, not one person doing all the work and the other person donating a name. To brand that partnership, [...]

Have you seen the large print cover for Agnes and the Hitman? As Lani said, “It’s like all the pretty in the world got sucked into the main cover, and all they had left was… that.”

No, I don’t know why Agnes is in bondage.
In other news, if you’ve been dying to [...]

It’s very odd being out of the country right before a book launch. I get up in the middle of the night (because that’s when I’m waking up anyway) to answer business e-mail, say yes or no to appearances, generally find out what’s stirring before Agnes hits the shelves on the 21st. [...]

Titles, like covers, are a marketing tool. That seems wrong, the title should be the author’s choice, encapsulating the theme of the book, but it really is one of the things that makes readers pull books off sheves, so when marketing says, “that won’t sell,” I roll with the changes. Welcome to Temptation [...]

So about audio books . . .
I don’t listen to mine because I can’t stand to be read to, but I know I need to sit down and do that some day. Even then, I won’t be the audience for the books, so I won’t be a good judge. I’ve talked briefly [...]

So with Don’t Look Down out in paperback, I thought you might like a look at that cover process, too. Of course, I am often wrong, so if you’re sick of covers, just skip this one.
Don’t Look Down was a tough, tough cover because, like The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, it was selling something new [...]

So Mollie and Mara have been working like madwomen, and now the merchandising designs are done and we have logos for both Agnes and the Hitman, the real book, and Mob Food, the fictional cookbook that Agnes writes in the real book. (We gave up on a tagline for the Cranky Agnes column; it [...]

Eileen Dreyer, Anne Stuart, and I have a collaborative novel coming out this week, and the cover journey for it was fraught with drama, probably the toughest cover process I’ve ever gone through. The design for this one was really demanding because

It was a mass market paper back which means the cover is [...]

We need another tagline.
I know, I KNOW, we tried to do this one on our own, but it’s not working.
Here’s the deal: We’re working on the merchandising (yes, FINALLY) and we’re at the Cranky Agnes stuff. This is not about Agnes and the Hitman, this is the merchandising that would have been [...]

We got our author copies in the mail and the cover is so beautiful, I can’t believe it. Just fabulous. (I’m going to blog about the hell we went through to get it next week.)
Oh, you’d like to see it, too?
Mollie’s giving away fifty copies. No lie.
Here’s the deal: If you [...]