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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhu's Librarian" data-source="post: 1145901" data-attributes="member: 11064">Yes, there are plenty of horror stories to go around. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Not to get too off topic, I've got one that may be my favorite, due to lack of communication between editors, art directors, and artists. The book was Guy Gavriel Kay's Sailing to Sarantium (the name is an allusion to W.B.Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, which heavily influenced the book). The artist requested to read the book, or at least several chapters, so he would have something to work from. I gave the art director a copy of the manuscript to send to the artist, and he said he would send the artist some relevent chapters with some ideas that were discussed in our weekly "cover meetings." A few weeks later, we got the artwork back just before deadline, only to find that it pictured the main character on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean, wind blowing through his hair. That was interesting, to say the least, since he never sets foot on a boat in the book (the title refers to a journey, not actually sailing on a ship). Some quick work was needed to remedy this, so the art was sent back to the artist with a revised deadline and instructions to redo the painting, only to be told that he didn't have the time as he was working on several other commissions. It was worked out between the art director and the artist to make some revisions to the existing work and to use some carefully considered editing and cropping of the painting, and we would make do. What we ended up with is what made the cover of the American edition of the novel (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0061059900/ref=lib_dp_TFCV/104-1246813-0288748?v=glance&s=books&vi=reader#reader-link" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0061059900/ref=lib_dp_TFCV/104-1246813-0288748?v=glance&s=books&vi=reader#reader-link</a>). Not a bad cover, but still not really an acurate representation of the book. All of this could have been avoided, had the art director sent the manuscript to the artist as requested, instead of only sending a few pages from the beginning that gave the main characters physical description. For some reason, I don't think the character has a beard in the book either, but that was considered too hard to repaint on short notice, so it was left on.</blockquote>

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