I have a very serious problem. I hired someone a year ago ($1000), a PhD historian, Holocaust expert and author (and Sandy Lantons neighbor) to review my novel The Clay Messiah. He loved it so much he offered a beautiful endorsement and gave me permission to publish it on my book cover. I had scheduled publication for this past January, but the broken leg delayed it. Now ready to publish, and on a deadline for a major contest I want to enter, I made the mistake of telling him that I was excited to finally be publishing. At first he wrote me an excited and explicit affirmation to use what he wrote. The following day what I got from him was what I can only describe as an outburst of mental illness. I got 5 emails in 30 minutes, each downgrading the blurb, each time citing someone who criticized Holocaust fiction. When I respectfully objected (by email) I was subjected to a stream of whining and complaining (any author would be thrilled with even the revised blurb, he always bends over backwards for people, and no one ever bends over backwards for him, etc.) In other words, he had a panic attack about how his piers would react to a book he endorsed and instead of honoring the original agreement, took the liberty and the opportunity to rescind his original statement, a statement whose truth and honesty he never refuted. Because I spent the day trying to reason with him (by email), he may come back today with something a little better, but it will surely contain cowardly caveats. (He is, apparently, exhausted by our correspondence.) (a) I can publish the book with the original blurb, knowing I have the legal right, but with the risk that this maniac might blackball me in the Holocaust community (unless, as I suspect by his dismissal from a Jewish museum in NYC he helped found, people in that community wont be prone to take him seriously), (b) I can accept whatever hes willing to hand out and eat crow, or (c) I can take the endorsement off the cover and lose out on a marketing opportunity I feel I rightly deserve (if I had published in January, as planned, there would have been no going back.) HELP!
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:46:26 +0000
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