If anyone out there has any doubt that the universe possesses a weird sense of humor and a deeply ingrained sense of irony, perhaps this and the following post will bolster my contention that it does.

 

 

 

 

 

Fortuitously, because I currently had a good literary agent (thanks to a famous writer who recommended me to his agency after a conference I attended), I ended up with a good contract. It took all summer to work out, and I think we irritated the hell out of my new publisher, but many years later, I was to be incredibly thankful that this worked out the way it did. My agent was actually representing my adult fiction, but because she was handling my work when I landed this sale, I asked her to negotiate the contract, which she very graciously did. Most picture books don’t get agented because there’s not enough money involved—except with celebrity authors—and therefore not enough of a commission to make it worth the agent’s while. But at the time, my agent was a new associate and building her list and skills, and I ended up the beneficiary.

 

As I found out later when I attended a children’s writing conference back East, the children’s publishing industry likes to keep the author and the illustrator of a book separate. This is probably to avoid the author meddling too much in the work of the illustrator, which I totally understand; but the extreme extent to which it can be taken feels pretty weird. To this day, I’ve never met the illustrator, though we did talk once on the phone after the title came out and he seemed like a great guy. At the time that my book got published, Green Tiger Press had been sold to a retired business executive (as artists and visionaries, the business side of publishing had proved challenging for the founders), and the Darlings had started a book designing business that they called Blue Lantern Studio. Blue Lantern chose content and matched it with artists, and they designed the books. When the books were printed, the new Green Tiger then took up the reins and publicized and distributed the titles.

 

My contract specified that I was to get a look at the book before it went to press, but perhaps the fact that there were two entities involved in the production of the book meant that this fell through the cracks. The first time that I saw the book was when I walked into a bookstore in Eugene, Oregon, where Richard and I were living at the time. That felt a little weird, too. At the same time, it was a huge thrill to see one of my books for sale in a book store, as you might imagine.

 

 

 

 

Surely, I thought, publishers would be interested in an author who wrote stories that children loved to hear over and over.

 

But that didn’t turn out to be the case. I had a lot of close calls and near misses, but finally, the boom in children’s picture books had waned and primarily celebrity authors were getting their titles published. In addition, illustrators were becoming loathe to share royalties with authors (not surprisingly, given that the royalties for a picture book are not that high to begin with) and were coming up with more of their own stories. So I gave up and went back to writing adult fiction. But ironically, this was not the end of the Hotdog’s story … .