Things around here lately have been pretty much dominated by the publication of Seven For A Secret, as you've probably noticed from the entries I've made, as well as all the entries I haven't made. The arrival of a new book is much like the arrival of a baby, but a book can be left on its own pretty quickly and it doesn't keep you up all night for years.

Like new parents, authors love to bore people with snapshots of their pride and joy. Baby photos are sent off to relatives, displayed on the office desk, and popped out of wallets and into the faces of the unwary at the least provocation. So too authors insist on sticking their book covers on their websites and blogs and, of course, everyone with a commercial interest, from Amazon.com to Schmoe's Books on eBay, show off the covers as well.

Imagine, though, if your kid had a beautiful purple face but in his photo, it looked blue. And the photo had his name on it, but it was the wrong name.

Alas, that is the case with Seven For A Secret. Mary and I were surprised, when we received a few boxes of books for signing, to see that the cover is not blue, but purple, and that rather than being subtitled "A John the Eunuch Mystery" it is called "A John the Lord Chamberlain Mystery."

I'm sure John is pleased. We certainly are. We don't know at what stage the change was made. I do know that materials for publicity, such as review copies, need to be made available long before the publication date. (Reviewers see advanced reading copies which have yet to be corrected.) The same may be true for cover images.

There's no way, nor any reason, to change the image that's propagated across the web. It's a perfectly fine cover as it is. However, I thought I'd put a copy of the real cover up on my virtual desk here!

Now I might need to monkey with my color scheme.