I’m going to tell you a brief story about a very rare book. It’s so rare that, to my knowledge, there is only one copy in existence in all the world.

What is this rare book?

Many moons ago I wrote a post about my misadventures in advertising my third Maiden Harlow book, Pretty Little Princesses, on Amazon. You can read the details here, but basically they found the cover unacceptable. They allowed me to publish it, but they wouldn’t approve it for Amazon Ads.

They claimed that it looked too menacing…and it was a fair argument all things considered.

Long-ish story short, I changed the cover and everything was rosy. But curiously, this cover does live on.

This changeover happened relatively early in my publishing career. At that point I sold mostly eBooks and only the occasional print copy. My eBooks still very much outsell the print books, but there are a lot of people that like a physical copy.

I looked back at it and realized that, as far as I know, one and only one printed copy of Pretty Little Princesses sold before I changed the cover. That means that somewhere out there is someone that owns the only copy of this book with this cover. I think that’s incredibly cool!

Who owns it?

I have no idea. They probably have no idea. And it probably wouldn’t knock their socks off if they did, but they do have a very rare book. Is it worth anything extra? No, no it certainly is not and I could submit the original cover for further printing any time I want. But I have no immediate plans to do that so, for this shining moment in time, someone owns the only copy of the ‘bloody knife’ version.

I genuinely never thought the original cover was that bad, and really it isn’t. But it’s fair to say that it suggests a level of violence that isn’t graphically depicted. This book is definitely more gruesome and corpse-filled compared to some of my other books (Deathly Cold is up there too), but it’s not the sort of thing that would haunt me for days. I personally don’t go for that level of violence, but each to their own.

Anyway, as far as that unique reader is concerned, I’d like to say thank you for not being put off by the ‘menacing’ gore. You’re a legend and I hope you enjoyed the story.

As an aside, here’s the new and current cover. There will pretty much always be blood on my mystery book covers. Apparently that’s fine as long as no one knows what device put it there.