It's True! You Really Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover!

Today I received the message below from a longtime church friend. This friend and her family switched from the church I still attend to the other large UU church in Houston during "The Troubles" that served as the initial inspiration for Earthworm.

Hi David,  

I got what I thought was your book.  It has the correct cover that says by David Bruce Collins, but inside the cover the book is Eastside by Caleb Alexander.  I noticed it when I was reading the Acknowledgements and the author mentions his wife Jennifer and his sons Curtis and Caleb.  He also thanks the Almighty Creator.  The setting is the eastside of San Antonio and he starts out mentioning 1,262 drive-by shootings in 1993.  Perhaps you should contact someone.  This book was published by Strebor Books in 2007.

She ordered the book directly from iUniverse, not from one of the big online vendors. It seems that iUniverse and Strebor have a deal with the same printing company. This news makes me wonder (and another friend has expressed the same thought) whether it's a sign that I should reach out to Caleb Alexander. Networking is usually a good thing. Also, his novel takes place, at least in part, less than two hours' drive from my fictitious college town of Santa Cecilia.

My other impression is that this right-cover-wrong-text foul-up will not happen to very many buyers of either Mr. Alexander's book or mine. iUniverse's model is on-demand printing, so it does not print and cover large numbers of copies of a book at one time—unless somebody orders a lot of copies. I'd be really surprised if the 20 copies I ordered for next week will have the same problem, but you'd better believe I'm going to check them before I try to sell them.