Bad Personality Syndrome

Will my publisher survive me?

I’ve always had a flamboyant side, a tendency to overbid at bridge and speak up at faculty meetings. I’m the one you see with a foot in my mouth, or dive-bombing into conflict.

When my elder daughter was in nursery school, I used to pick her up every afternoon. At the top of our driveway, I’d stop at the mailbox, and my little girl would open it from her car seat and pull the letters in through the window. A special treat.

One day, after a long and harrowing day of high school teaching, I was late for nursery-school pickup. The care-giver wasn’t too thrilled with me as I snatched up my precious darling and plonked her in her car seat.

On this afternoon, the mailbox contained a fat pile of letters, which my daughter started pulling in one at a time, slowly, as if she was picking daisies in a meadow, one flower here, a dandelion there, tra la la, la la, all the time in the world.

“Hurry up,” I said, “Get the mail in the car already.” Or some such thing.

She paused, a floppy letter dangling in the air from a tiny, dimpled hand. Then she turned to face me.

“Grownups should be patient with small children,” she said. “Daddy would never say that.” She was two.

Fast forward four years to the Suzuki violin lessons.

Two little girls, one five and one six. Playing twinkle twinkle on their adorable baby violins. Let me assure you I was a Suzuki mom nonpareil, totally into the daily practicing routine, all soft-voiced, cooing, playing along on my miniature organ so Mommy could demmy what it should sound like.

One day, at the high school where I taught, I was hauled before The Student Discipline Committee for being too intolerant in the matter of student tardiness to class. The school was run as a democracy, and my locked-door-after-start-of-math-class policy didn’t sit too well. Something about late students banging on the windows and disturbing the Peace in the Quad. I was duly chastened, and arrived home in a foul mood.

My husband was doing Suzuki practice with the little musicians. This time, my elder daughter was tackling Bach’s Minuet 3, and it was screech-scratch-screech all the way. I grabbed chunks of my hair in both hands and yelled, “Stop! That sounds awful!” What I should have said, in a mellow Suzuki voice was, “Sweetheart, that is lovely, but if you just move your finger a tiny bit up the G-string, it’ll sound even more beautiful.”

Tears ran down my sweet daughter’s face, as she laid her precious violin on the couch.

I ran to hug her and assure her we’d practice some more and get the piece right, which made her bawl into my shoulder.

“God, you’re a shit,” my husband said to me.

“Mommy, you’re a shit,” the five-year-old said.

“Fine, I’m a shit.” I grabbed my school bag, turned around, marched out of the house, and spent the next three hours crunching on stale crackers at the Wellesley Library, as I contemplated my failings as a Teacher and a Mother.

 So what went down with my publisher? I’ll refer to him as Stan.

Let me state up front that Stan loved my novels, which is more than I can say for the raging hoards of agents, editors, and bottom feeders who rejected them. After taking me on, Stan designed a deliciously ominous cover for my thriller, A Reluctant Spy. During long days of book production, we amicably settled the issue of the Blob scene delimiter. We survived the hyphen crisis. Stan continued to indulge me throughout the back cover creation, shuffling, to my heart’s content, the author photo, bio, and blurb around the diabolical synopsis.

My novel—in all of its outward manifestations—became this perfect jewel of a thing.

I was filled with warm, fuzzy feelings of love and appreciation.

This was the honeymoon phase.

Then came the Amazon Incident.

It started when Stan postponed my release date from October 2024, to January 2025. Some story about a superior marketing push in the new year. Other than the fact that I had to cancel the launch in the lovely local bookstore, and send out a sad email newsletter to my 400 friends and supporters, and trash the gorgeous posters that were already distributed, and move house from Upstate New York to California in December, I was fine with it. Honestly. Debut authors are peons, so what’s a 76-year-old girl to do? Lead a protest?

My book had already been up on Amazon, announcing the October release date and providing a link to pre-order the paperback. My darling family and friends had rushed to pre-order. Joy had been in the air.

Sometime after the release date had been postponed, I received the following message from a friend:

I pre-ordered A Reluctant Spy on Amazon a while back and received an email yesterday that the order was cancelled. I noticed on both Amazon.ca, .com, and the UK Amazon that the paperback option now says “unavailable”. Probably nothing to fret over. They may be switching things out on the back end, or changing distribution details at Amazon, but thought that was worth passing along.

With trembling hand, I looked up A Reluctant Spy on Amazon.

The first Amazon page for the book still had the October 2024 publication date! When I clicked on the book image, the page that appeared had the following message where the pre-order button used to be:

Currently unavailable. We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.

HEROINE AUTHOR WITH FLICKERING CANDELABRA DESCENDS DARK STAIRCASE INTO FIERY PIT OF HELL.

I gritted every tooth that was left and wrote to my publisher.

“… All of this is very dispiriting. I’m trying hard to keep up my marketing end of things …. It would be great, Stan, if you used your publishing chops (which I know are considerable) to yell and scream for those changes to be made. Please don’t tell me you have no control over it. Would you tolerate it if it were your novel??”

He wrote back a Zen message with screen shots of various Amazon sites in the world that had the right message. Amazon USA, however, was not one of them.

Friends started bugging me—was the book still being published? Was I still alive? Here were some negative messages they had received from Amazon.

HEROINE’S HEART SHRINKS IN WEEKLONG PURGATORY OF HOT COALS.

I wrote to Stan again. “Help!!! Are you able to hassle someone to change this??? Use some muscle!!” Followed by a screaming emoji with tears.

He responded. “I don’t think your urging me to ‘use some muscle’ accomplishes what you think it accomplishes. It’s, in fact, more than a little demeaning. That said, a correction was made on National Book Network’s side this morning to address this.”

The problem was fixed that day. I wrote to Stan immediately and said I would never intentionally demean him. Who, me? Of course I wouldn’t.

DEMON AUTHOR VAPORIZES PUBLISHER IN PUFF OF SMOKE.

Stan and I have not exchanged messages since.

I’ve resisted the urge to check whether the book actually exists and if the paperbacks have traveled safely from distant shores to the warehouse. There has to be a warehouse at the end of the rainbow, right?

My novel A Reluctant Spy is still on track to be released on January 21, 2025. Scout’s honor. It is currently available for pre-order.