Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Case of the Imposter Novel


I was talking with a friend last night, and asked her how she was enjoying my book, "Double Blind," which I gave to her a few weeks previous.

"Well, the setup's taking a little too long."

"Wow. That's curious. No one's mentioned that before."

"Well, it's all that stuff about the sheriff, and his relationship with the married woman."

"But my novel doesn't have a sheriff."

"Of course it does!"

"I swear, honey, I wrote the book - there's no sheriff."

When she checked the book that night, she discovered that IUniverse had somehow sent me a book with my cover but somone else's text! A check of my inventory revealed that, thank goodness, this hadn't happened with any of the other copies. But my friend had been plodding through this story, thinking how different it was from my previous novel, for almost a month.

"Well why didn't you say something?" I asked.

"It wasn't very good," she said. "And I didn't want to hurt your feelings."

4 comments:

... Paige said...

Now that's a good friend and so like a woman to not want to hurt your feelings.

Now a guy may have said something like...

Hey dude this sucks. What's up?

They did get the little problem fixed right?

Michael J. Vaughn said...

She said at one point she was thinking, "This novel seems to be written in a completely different style!"

I'm going to head to a couple local stores today and run through the copies on their shelves just to make sure.

J. M. Strother said...

Wow, that's pretty unbelievable. Good idea to go out and check on the rest of the kids. Is there any way to know how many mix ups happened?

I suppose this sort of thing can happen even with big publishers.
~jon

Michael J. Vaughn said...

Well the one local store is clean. I'll have to go check the other. Lord knows if some of these got sold to unsuspecting readers!

Meanwhile, I made sure to flip through my first shipment of the new novel, just to be sure!