The last Bo Bradley mystery, The Dollmaker’s Daughters, is finally available on Amazon for Kindle! Noting that this little event has not been a walk in the park is like saying Pilgrim’s Progress is the tiniest bit prosaic. To wit: I thought I would never get this book up on Amazon.
I mean, it’s Bo’s last adventure (although two more have been sitting around in outline form for nearly a decade – should I write them?) and I really wanted the whole series to be available. Thousands of people, one of them very close to me, live hard with psychiatric disorders that are grossly misunderstood, distorted and demonized in popular fiction and the media. The “lunatic killer” is a stigmatizing staple; I wrote the Bo Bradley novels to diminish the stigma and I wanted them all out there.
And now they are, thanks to the following people who helped hack a path through the at-times impenetrable briar patch of digital publishing.
Thanks to Andrea Cavallaro, Rights Manager for literary agent Sandra Dijkstra. Andrea spent nearly an entire year chasing down the necessary rights reversion for this book through the tangled maze of French-owned Hachette, which ages ago bought my publisher, Warner Books, and with it the rights to my last three books – The Dollmaker’s Daughters, Blue and The Last Blue Plate Special. (My sainted editor, Sara Ann Freed, had with incredible foresight arranged for the legal rights reversion to the first four to me shortly before her death. At the time I had no idea why she’d done that. Now I know. Thanks, Sara Ann!) (And the last two books, featuring social psychologist Blue McCarron, can never be re-published by me. Those rights are eternally in the hands of Hachette.)
Thanks to Michèle Magnin, who while I paced holes in the carpet, fed the converted manuscript of The Dollmaker’s Daughters through the necessary additional conversions – to Web, through Calibre, to Mobi, then Kindle – countless times over a period of weeks, only to join me in breathtaking realms of despair every time it didn’t work.
Thanks to writer Consuelo Baehr (http://setthiswriterfree.blogspot.com) for immediate responses to anguished middle-of-the-night emails about this, even offering to do it for me! (Consuelo lives on the East Coast, so imagine what time those middle-of-the-night emails from California got there.)
Thanks to my cover artist (DeronLeeAssociates@gmail.com) for several versions culminating in the terrific one you see.
And final thanks to writer Mary Lou Locke (http://mlouisalocke.com) who, on the last day of the year as I sank one more time into the Slough of Publishing Despond, just took the whole bloody, messed-up converted file and fixed it! The guy who did the original conversion from the printed book apparently overlooked several thousand teensy, toxic, imbedded codes that, had they not jammed Amazon’s system, would have turned the text into a sequence of dashes. Lou found the bugs, killed them and briskly sent me an attachment that is now… an eBook!
So on the last day of 2011 the last Bo Bradley tale is launched, completing once again a series I hope will help.
Happy New Year!