Go to any reader’s forum and you’ll find a variety of complaints about books. Perhaps the cover is ugly, perhaps the reader can’t find the book in stores, or perhaps the price is too high. Valid complaints, but usually not the author’s fault. Before I signed the contract for my debut book, Wild Heart, even I hadn’t realized how little control authors have over their books. So what do we have little or no control over? Title and Cover: You’d think an author would be able to title her own book. Think again. Most of the time, a book’s title is changed by the editor. The title for my debut book started out as To Tame His Heart. It’s now Wild Heart. And for the book cover, it’s even worse. For an author, getting a book cover is one of the most important moments in our career. The cover is the face of our book, what the world will see for years to come. For an author who gets a bad cover, it’s like a punch to the gut and there is pretty much nothing we can do about it. When I got the book cover for my debut book,…

April 2009On Sale: March 26, 2009Featuring: Jed DeLanda656 pages ISBN: 0525950516EAN: 9780525950516Hardcover$28.95 Thriller Arcane Buy at Amazon.com In The Courts Of The Sun by Brian D’Amato A mind-bending, time-bending, zeitgeist-defining novel about the days leading up to December 21, 2012—the day the Maya predicted the world would end December 21, 2012. The day time stops. Jed DeLanda, a descendant of the Maya living in the year 2012, is a math prodigy who spends his time playing Go against his computer and raking in profits from online trading. (His secret weapon? A Mayan divination game—once used for predicting corn-harvest cycles, now proving very useful in predicting corn futures—that his mother taught him.) But Jed’s life is thrown into chaos when his former mentor, the game theorist Taro, and a mysterious woman named Marena Park, invite him to give his opinion on a newly discovered Mayan codex. Marena and Taro are looking for a volunteer to travel back to 664 AD to learn more about a “sacrifice game” described in the codex. Jed leaps at the chance, and soon scientists are replicating his brain waves and sending them through a wormhole, straight into the mind of a Mayan king… Only something goes…