Nicholas: Lord of Secrets

Acknowledgments

Nick and Leah’s story is dear to me, but preparing it for publication at the same time Darius and Vivian’s tale is in production (along with other related stories) has put significant demands on the folks at Sourcebooks, Inc., who turn my manuscripts into pretty books. I’m especially indebted to my book people for ensuring that Nick and Leah’s romance has found its way into readers’ hands, with specific thanks as follows:

My editor, Deb Werksman, can turn straw into gold. I swear to peaches, this is so. Even after eight books, I’m not sure how she does this, but the knowledge that she’s going to read every word of every manuscript, and pluck from a draft the potential for a great read amazes me and inspires me to keep coming up with the drafts.

Susie Yoder Benton is our scheduling goddess, and has kept the raw material for five series, a smattering of enovellas, and a few stray single titles moving into and through the Magic Tunnel of production without her once climbing through the phone or cyberspace and ’splaining to me the precise meaning of the term deadline. Deb spins straw into gold, but Susie can stretch time.

Cat Clyne has the dubious honor of extracting from me the dreaded marketing synopsis, positioning statement, and (muahaha music goes here) the tagline necessary to appease the voracious shifters who inhabit the shadowed realms of marketing and sales. Whether she wants it or not, Cat also gets a generous serving of whining with every attempt on my part to generate marketing material. Susie stretches time, but Cat sprinkles the magic dust of good humor at the right moment to prevent me from having tantrums.

Skye Agnew, in truth, has security clearances so classified we aren’t even allowed to know what they’re called, and she uses them to run some complex, advanced, invisible, alternate universe. She only masquerades as a production editor so she’ll have an excuse for lapsing into thoughtful silences when other people would roll their eyes and bellow, “Are you nuts? I don’t have time to look up when the word “sandpaper” was first used in southern England!”

Skye knows the older term was glasspaper, and she knows why, and she has the cites. Scary.

Danielle Jackson is my publicist—it’s fun to write that, as if I’m her sole concern from morning until night, but Danielle is responsible for supporting dozens of books every year. She organizes blog tours, splatters Advanced Reader Copies across the known universe and the blogosphere, has a grasp of market mechanics that leaves me agog, and can pull off a thirty-author signing like rolling off a log. More impressive than all that, she answers emails lickety-split. How cool is that?

Dominique Raccah is our publisher, the owner, visionary, and chief alchemist at Sourcebooks, Inc. Dominique has a growing company to run, many planes to catch, and a calendar full of international conferences to dazzle with her insight and imagination, but when one of my books felt like it needed the exasperating, elusive “something” tweaked, Dominique read the entire manuscript and pinpointed the difficulty. Wow and double wow.

With people like this to work with book after book, an author can only be grateful and humble.