MAY 2026 | WRITER ISSUE

Under the Covers

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As I’m in the throes of promoting and preparing for the launch of my second book, I thought this would be a good time to give you guys, my friends and acquaintances in the writing and publishing community, a little look under the covers of my second experience working with a small independent publisher. (For the record, after publishing my first book, I went into explicit detail on Medium about the ups and downs of working with a small publisher. I’m actually not sure whether I did that as an act of anonymous commiseration or a word to the wise, but it did prompt a few appreciative replies, for which I was grateful.)

The Author Questionnaire: A Necessary Evil

At the risk of going all TMI, every other time I sign on to a Zoom session with my therapist, I am greeted with a questionnaire, which I dutifully fill out nearly every time. And each time, it asks me the same questions about how I’m doing mentally and physically and how things are going with my therapist. And while I can see the utility of such a thing—I did, in fact, administer a number of questionnaires during my tech career—I eventually find myself asking, Does anyone actually look at this stuff? Because I don’t see any evidence that anyone does. My therapist never mentions it, and I’m certainly not receiving any emails along the lines of “We noticed you haven’t been sleeping well lately! Here are ten tips for a better night’s sleep!” For the most part, this is the role of questionnaires in our lives: some typically faceless organization asks us a bunch of questions, each of which require consideration and some of which require research, we answer the questions, and then the whole thing disappears into the ether.

As authors, some of you have faced this head-on with the dreaded Author Questionnaire, typically a multi-page document requiring narrative responses (no checkboxes or multiple choice here!) to explain things like what floats your boat as a writer and why you chose to write this particular book at this particular time in this particular place. I’ve done this now for both of my publishers, but this time around I decided to hire a publicist to help me promote the book, and the publicist had their own version. In it, the publicist asked for a detailed list of pretty much anyone I knew who had anything to do with reading, writing, or publishing. I responded with a spreadsheet with dozens of names on it—apparently, I have an unusually large network—and the response was baffling: “What are we supposed to do with this?” they asked me, and my answer was, essentially, “I don’t know! You’re the ones who asked for it!”

What followed was a lengthy email back-and-forth, the final result of which was little more than a rocky start to the publicist-author relationship. I still have no idea whether they’ll use the list, and if so, how, but the publicity work has moved on (see below), and I’m hopeful they’ll do a solid job for me in the end. As we all know, in the final analysis it’s the book itself that does the selling, and I’ve decided this time around to give it a little help, so my fingers remain crossed.

The Book Cover Saga

In my last general newsletter, I showed you the Tristan 4 America cover, and I expect your impressions were varied. When my publisher sent me the preliminary cover design some months ago, I had made some suggestions for changes, but unfortunately, they weren’t particularly receptive to my comments. For an emerging author like me, this is one of many instances where you just sort of a go with the flow, so the cover remained as they had designed it.

But then, the publicist posted the book to NetGalley, which most of you know is a platform used to generate pre-release reviews and buzz for new books—a platform my publicist swears by. And what I didn’t know but soon discovered was that NetGalley allows users to judge a book’s cover using a simple thumbs-up / thumbs-down feature. Spoiler alert: readers do not like my book’s cover. Not only did the vast majority of users click thumbs-down, but some even took the time to tell my publicist why, which was that it was perceived to have been AI-generated. I say “perceived” because, with a nudge from my publicist, I presented this information to the publisher, going so far as to ask for a cover redesign. The book doesn’t launch until October, so both the publicist and I were hopeful that the cover’s poor reception on NetGalley would hold sway, and that a redesign could be done. Well, not so fast. Not only were the wheels of publication turning too fast at this point to allow for a new cover, but the publisher insisted the cover was not AI-generated, and that the designer had just used AI to “assist” in the design. I’ll let you be the judge, and whatever you think of the cover, I hope you’ll give the book a chance, because inside you’ll find a “literary novel with the pulse of a political thriller.” (That tagline, by the way, is from the publisher, so, credit where credit is due.)

The Reviews Are Coming In

Moving on from the great cover controversy, Tristan 4 America is now getting its first round of early reviews, and they—or the paid ones anyway—are looking pretty good: 4.5/5 from the San Francisco Book Review and Los Angeles Book Review, and a glowing narrative and almost all A’s from Publishers’ Weekly. (“Almost all A’s” = one B, for the cover.)

I’ll include some juicy snippets from the reviews themselves in my general newsletter, which will come out in a week or two, and I’ll send links to the reviews as soon as they’re available.

I hope you found this look inside my publication experience helpful. Please do respond via e-mail if you have comments or questions—and yes, I do want to know what you think of the cover. AI-generated or not? If you reach out, I might just give you my opinion.

In case you missed them, previous editions of the Bruce Overby newsletter can be viewed online here.

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