Cecilia Tan
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Continuing the ctan book cover tour. This is the first rough image of Black Feathers, my short story collection that came out from HarperCollins in 1998. Erotic short stories, many of them sf/f, and they published it as literary fiction. Yep, there's a "full figure" on there.
05:04 PM - Feb 20, 2023
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Cecilia Tan
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In response to Cecilia Tan.
Another story about the Black Feathers book cover. When it eventually went out of print at Harper, I got the rights back and wanted to do an ebook edition myself. I googled the original photographer to see if I could buy the rights to that photo. I found him but...
05:14 PM - Feb 20, 2023
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Cecilia Tan
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In response to Cecilia Tan.
He was having some kind of crisis. On the phone he didn't give details but it sounded like someone stealing/destroying his negatives...? But he promised to send me a transparency of the image. What arrived in the mail, though was the image from a different book, the anthology On a Bed of Rice!
05:17 PM - Feb 20, 2023
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Cecilia Tan
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In response to Cecilia Tan.
Borders Bookstores sold thousands of this book. Barnes & Noble probably did similarly. No one at the time worried about the lack of clothing on the model. Elizabeth Wurtzel had just published an autobiographical book with herself nude on the cover. (This is why I had to tell people it wasn't me)
05:06 PM - Feb 20, 2023
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Cecilia Tan
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In response to Cecilia Tan.
(Threading is still weird... I now see some of my replies to the original post, but some are out of order. And they show up in this thread: https://spoutible.com/thre... but not the one you get if you click "Thread" in the three dot menu...?)
05:21 PM - Feb 20, 2023
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Cecilia Tan
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In response to Cecilia Tan.
Another thing about the nudity on this cover, which was acceptable to literary bookstores and publishers in 1998, is that if I tried to self-publish it today on Amazon, it would probably get rejected. But if Farrar Strauss or Grove or another literary publisher did, it would be let through.
05:26 PM - Feb 20, 2023
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