You can’t judge a book…

Annamaria on Monday

Here are the beginning lyrics to old R&B song:

You can't judge an apple by looking at the tree,

You can't judge honey by looking at the bee,

You can't judge a sister by looking at the brother,

You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Oh can't you see, oh, you misjudged me.

I look like a farmer but I'm a lover,

You can't judge a book by looking at the cover.

Caro’s post last week about strange titles made me think about how, a few times, my publishers changed the titles of my books.  Most of the time, they turned out to be right.  But there have been a couple of instances when the publisher tried to get me to change the title and I refused:  Notably for my best selling book every—Never Work for a Jerk.  They wanted me to call it HOW to Work for a Jerk, because they thought that a more positive spin might be more appealing.  I debated the point.  And I won.

On the other hand, I have almost never won a battle about a cover.  Almost. 

Generally, publishers, not writers, get to choose the cover art.  Sometimes we are happy, sometimes not. Except for folks like James Patterson and Mary Higgins Clark, authors have little, if anything, to say about book cover design.

This rule is not confined to fiction. My nonfiction went through similar choices. Never Work for a Jerk started with a jackass in a business suit, a splendid choice in my estimation.

But the paperback publisher thought the design too staid. They came up with something much more lively.  I doubt Dell was right about that, because when Barnes and Noble acquired the rights for their own edition, they went back to the jackass cover.

The foreign rights publishers had their own ideas.

         

Only once did I try to influence what a nonfiction book looked like. Both my agent and I tried our very best to put the kibosh on the cover for Monster Boss. Except for the fake tear, it looks to me like the cover of procedures manual on water heater repair.  But the publisher would not budge.  Would this catch your eye?

 

When it came to my novels, I was thrilled when saw the original cover for City of Silver. I had dreamed what it might be many times. During the long years of looking for an agent for the book and then waiting while it worked its way through the publication process, I imagined what the published book would look like. I had, in my mind's eye, the cover of a favorite history used in my research.  When my editor asked me for cover ideas, I sent this image of the whole dust jacket, including the spine and the back cover:

The final design for the novel surpassed all my expectations. It was totally beautiful to me, perhaps because it was my first novel. But it really is a lovely physical specimen of a book. (By the way, its interior is also a knockout. The front pages and the chapter beginnings are all designed to look like a seventeenth century book. What a gorgeous touch!)

Then, when Felony and Mayhem Press acquired the paperback rights, Maggie Topkis, the publisher, thought the original cover too staid for what she considered a lively story. She decided to replace it with a cover she thought did the story justice.

When I first saw the new design, it was so different from its predecessor, I was nonplussed. But everyone I asked liked it a lot.  And I knew that Maggie had had twenty years experience as a bookseller, which meant she had watched what readers reached for.   Sometimes the most aesthetically pleasing is not the most alluring to potential book buyers.

 

Invisible Country’s cover is a knockout.  It never made it into a paperback edition, so here is the only cover it’s ever had.

With Blood Tango, I had a fright on my hands.  The originally cover artist never completed the job.  His replacement came up with this:

It looked to me like a cheesy romance cover.  It said nothing about it being a historical novel, nothing about the darkness of the mystery or the glamor of the historic character who is central to the story—Evita.   I put my foot down.   In the end, they sent me a different cover, with a historic picture of Buenos Aires.  I showed it to my daughter.  She liked the photo but said the cover needed a woman on it.  She was so right.  I asked them to insert a blonde woman in the picture and to give her a red dress.  They did. 

 Then came the African series.  Africa is the MOST photogenic place on earth.  Have you ever noticed how travel companies that deal worldwide always have images of Africa on their promotional materials.  What’s on the walls of photographic equipment stores world wide?  Africa!  An alluring cover was a foregone conclusion. 

I loved the original cover of Strange Gods.

But once again, I am thrilled to say, Felony and Mayhem acquired the paperback rights, and Maggie went for a more striking cover image.

She also created great fanfare for the paperback’s launch last weekend at Left Coast Crime, including a Strange Gods t-shirt and making the Strange God the official cocktail of convention.  Needless to say, I was thrilled about that!

And now we are aiming to launch the second in the series, The Idol of Mombasa at Bouchercon in New Orleans in September.

This post is a whole lot of shameless self-promotion.  MIE’s rules allow us one such entry each year.  I forewent my turn at SSP in 2015 because I had no new book last year.  I collected on that rain check today.   I will have more to say about The Idol closer to the launch date.  

How Refrigeration Invented Juan Perón

Juan and Eva at the height of their power

The famous stage musical Evita features, among other historic characters, Juan Domingo Perón.  In it, he is portrayed as a weak, self-doubting, and confused army officer subject to the will of a sexually powerful and monumentally ambitious soap opera actress, who goads him with her sharp demands that he be a MAN.  Perón plays Adam to Eva Duarte’s…well, Eve.  This is the Perón most English-speaking people know.

The facts of Perón’s life belie this characterization.  In actuality, when he and Evita met, Perón was the powerful one and Eva, though desperate for success, was only newly arrived from grinding poverty and nearly total rejection by the entertainment industry of her childhood dreams.

Perón, on the other hand, grew up with many more opportunities than Eva ever had.  He was from a Buenos Aires Spanish-Sardinian immigrant family, got a good education, and found power in the Army.  His paternal grandfather was a prosperous physician; his father a fairly successful sheep farmer.  At the age of nine he was sent to boarding school and after graduating, joined the military.  He became an instructor in military history at the Superior War College and even published several treatises on the subject.  Eventually, he was sent as a military attaché to Chile, and in a life changing assignment, posted as a military observer to Italy, Germany, and Spain.

In Europe he learned from masters how a leader might manipulate the populace.  In Rome, he admired the pageantry of Italian fascism and saw firsthand the crowds in the piazzas, chanting, “Duce.  Duce.”

In Berlin, he stood in the Lustgarten and heard Der Fuhrer harangue a vast mob of delirious Germans, who then shouted, “Sieg heil.  Sieg heil.”

Such power, such adulation became the stuff of Perón’s dreams.

So where does refrigeration come into it?  Let’s go back in time and find out.  In the 19^th Century, Argentina’s main export was beef.  Huge numbers of cattle were raised on the plains of the Pampas, herded to the port of Buenos Aires, and shipped to Europe—beef on the hoof.  Then, engineers began to figure out how meat could be kept frozen aboard sailing ships.  In 1882, for the first time, a shipment of meat from New Zealand arrived in London still frozen and turned a profit for the company involved.  By 1895, the year of Perón’s birth, slaughtering the beasts, packing the meat, and shipping it on refrigerated ships became the great new technology.  Reefer ships plied international waters (NO, not those kinds of reefers.  This “reefer” was short for refrigeration), and Buenos Aires began to change its way of doing business with the beefeaters of Europe.

The first ship to successfully transport refrigerated meat

Like all big technological advances, the advent of reefer ships caused profound social changes.  Before refrigeration, there were two very different Argentinas: Buenos Aires, the port city of white people—original Spanish settlers and then vast numbers of European immigrants who came as skilled workers to build elegant buildings and manufacture shoes and textiles.  The other was a vast plain, owned by a few families and occupied by brown South American Indians who herded cattle and eked out what existence they could in the largely desolate countryside.

Suddenly, though, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there were jobs for unskilled people at the port—in slaughter houses and meat-packing plants.  Hundreds of thousands from the interior came to Buenos Aires in search of work.  They found nasty, difficult job, only hovels to live in, and next to nothing in the way of social services.  Their employers ignored their needs and created fertile ground for Perón on his path to power.

President Farrell and Peron
 before his was deposed

Back in Argentina from his tuition-free education in European populist politics, Perón became part of a military government.  He held three positions: two very prestigious—Vice President and Minister of War.  The third was a post no one thought at all important—Secretary of Labor.  But Juan Domingo knew better.  That rather distained job became the fulcrum he used to lift himself.  He used it to pass regulations requiring better wages for the low-level workers who were doing the beef industry’s dirty work in dreadful slums on the periphery of the “Paris of the South.”  He made sure they got vacations and health insurance.  He was the only person in power who gave a fig about them.  And they knew it.  He saw to it that they did.

 

The workers' demonstration at the Casa Rosada,
17 October 1945

When chaos broke out after the end of World War II, with crowds demanding the end of the military regime, Perón became the target of those demands.  All those middle class white people demonstrating the plazas and along the avenidas, whether from the left or the right, called for his downfall.  In an attempt to quell the tumult, his fellow officers in the junta deposed him.  Their sop to the populace backfired.  The next thing they knew, all those little brown men from the fringes of the city were in the center, right in front of their elegant Casa Rosada.  And they were chanting—just like those crowds in Rome and Berlin.  But they were shouting the name of their only benefactor: “Perón.  Perón.”

The best I can do during launch week

As I write this, it is Sunday of the week Blood Tango launched.  I have been so busy promoting it that I haven’t got two minutes to rub together to think of a proper blog topic, much less write one.  This is the fate of all mid-list authors: self-promotion.  So I have been running about the New York Metropolitan area doing what I can to get the book noticed.   So far, I have signed in a bookstore, attended a tango flash mob in Dag Hammarskjold Park, presided over a dinner with the dancers in said extravaganza, and presented at a library.

Truth be told, I enjoyed it all immensely.   Many writers, most of whom started much earlier than I, lament having to stand up and talk about their work.  But having spent two and a half decades of my life traveling around the world speaking to business groups and marketing my ability to do so, public speaking suits me.  It makes me feel sure of myself, which writing novels never does.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer writing stories to any other work.  I waited so long for my fiction to be published that I still feel as if I’m in wonderland, especially during a week like this.  It’s just that writing stories takes every cell in my brain and every blood drop in my heart.  Talking about a book after the fact may be far less soul-satisfying, but it is a whole lot simpler.

Given the above, my post for this week will have to be part of a work in progress.  I am preparing a series of photos of Buenos Aires for my website.  If you have not seen the ones of Potosí  that I put up, matched with quotes from City of Silver, please take a look at the Photos page of www.annamariaalfieri.com.  The architecture in that city at 13,500 ft. is one of the marvels of the world.

The photos of Blood Tango’s locations in Buenos Aires will also be matched with quotes from the text.  This requires rereading the now printed book and selecting the right images from the hundred plus I snapped while in Buenos Aires in January of 2012.  Here is what I have so far:

“…nineteenth century buildings of scale and grace had earned the city its sobriquet—Paris of the South.”  Page 3

“If the rabble decided to bring their outrage to the seat of government, they would have only a few blocks to march to the Casa Rosada….”  Page 11.

“In their hovels in the villas miserias around the factories on the periphery, the poor rejoiced over the parting gifts Perón had announced over the radio…”  Page 45.

“...he accompanied Strade and his coterie of magnates down the regal staircase to the front door and saw them off.”  Page 99.

Next week, back to normal—whatever that is.

Annamaria - Monday

What's in a Name?

When Jeff was writing his introduction of me last week, he asked if I minded his telling you my real name—Patricia King. I said I did not. I decided to use a pseudonym for my fiction, not because I want to hide from the public, but because I want to distinguish myself from all the other Patricia Kings of which there are thousands.

The latest searchable census data, from 1990, gives the following statistics for the US:

• Number of people named Patricia, the second most popular female name: 1,628,911
• Number of people with the last name King, the 30^th most popular last name: 475,530
• Number of people named Patricia King: 2,975

 If you search “Patricia King” with Google you get 59,800,000 hits in .2 seconds.  You will not find me on any of the first 60 million or so.

Patricia King on the cover of
her last nonfiction book:
Monster Boss

I had written my nonfiction books under my real name, which made sense since they were all connected with my consulting practice. Other nonfiction writers were publishing as Patricia King: a sociologist, an expert in dollhouses, and most notably toward the end of my nonfiction career, a televangelist and entrepreneur who has published sixteen books.  More than one person, upon meeting me actually told me that they had googled me and thought I was she.

Patricia King, the televangelist and entrepreneur

When I finally broke through into as a published novelist, I wanted a name that would distinguish me from the other 2,974 women who carried my name, especially the authors.

Truth be told, I also wanted a name that would get me www-dot-fill-in-the-blank-dot-com.

My first thought was to name myself after my female forbears.  It would connect my name with my heritage for one thing.  And, to me, their names were mellifluous and much more romantic than the rather business-like and prosaic Patricia King.  So I chose my mother’s first name—Annamaria and her mother’s maiden name—Alfieri.  I wanted to honor those women, who never had my opportunities.  My mother never got to graduate from high school.  Both my grandmothers were illiterate.  I think it is amazing and wonderful that, under the circumstances, I got to be an author.

My mother: Annamaria Pisacane Puglise

On the left: Sabina Maria Alfieri Pisacane

The Original Annamaria Alfieri with her husband,Francesco

After my first novel was published using her name, I found out that my great grandmother was called the same—Annamaria Alfieri.  This makes sense since the tradition among many Italians is to name their children after the grandparents.  My mother, like many Italian second daughters, carried her mother’s mother’s first name.

I have only two memories of the real Annamaria Alfieri.  In the first, I am only around three and sitting on her lap; she is calling me “tesoro,” Italian for “treasure,” used as we would say “darling.”  The other is being five and standing at the foot of her bed, not really being able to see her nor understanding that she lay dying.  She was 95.  I would like to believe she knows I took her name.

By the way, Annamaria’s/my third South American historical mystery launches tomorrow.  Blood Tango takes place against the most tumultuous week in Argentine history, Buenos Aires 1945.  It imagines the murder of an Evita lookalike.  You can read all about it and get a sample chapter at www.annamariaalfieri.com

Annamaria Alfieri - Monday