Cover art: the great adventure in miscommunication

So what's new with the book? It's coming out soon, right?

Well...we kind of hit a speedbump, and the release date might be pushed back just a tad.


Huh? Why? I thought everything was going great?

It is! We just ran into some problems when it came to the cover art. The initial draft of the cover--which I unfortunately can't share with you--got some thing right. It had this awesome grain to it, as if it had been printed on a tapestry. The cover artist, bless zir pointy head, had found a medieval village that was a perfect stand-in for Rivervale, one of the locations in the book.

Unfortunately there were also two male models on the cover who, well, one of them had a lantern jaw and five o'clock shadow, and the other was Shirtless. The capitalization is intentional: this guy had a six-pack, oiled skin, and some truly magnificent delts.


Sounds awesome. What's the problem?

Well,
1. My characters are both in their late teens.
2. One is described as very thin and covered in scars.
3. The other is a grubby village boy who's described as small and wiry.

Which, to be fair to the poor cover artist, I had submitted the story as an adult gay romance novel. That's my own fault, and the executive editor very kindly sat me down and explained about branding and about how a) we couldn't put models who looked like Eiland or Charon on my book cover without visually branding it as young adult and b) if there was going to be explicit sex (which, my original manuscript had one fairly explicit scene), we needed to make that VERY CLEAR on the cover.


Hence, oily nipples.

Bingo.


So what're you doing about it?

I've gone through and taken out pretty much all of the sexual content. It didn't really take long, there wasn't much there in the first place. Really, I should have submitted it as YA, but I just wasn't thinking right. I'm not great at branding and marketing and being mindful of my audience. Thank god I've got editors for that sort of thing.


So when is the new release date?

Not quite sure yet.


Seriously??

These things take time! I'd rather have a good cover and a clear marketing message than release a book in the wrong genre and get all borked up.

However...if it does get pushed back...one of the other dates mentioned was 4/20.


...that would be hilarious.

I KNOW. I could totally talk my bro-dude pothead friends into buying a gay YA novel on 4/20.