Hero Under Cover

Trivia

• On the back cover copy for HERO UNDER COVER, the heroine is called “Annie Morgan” instead of “Annie Morrow.”

Note From Suz: Okay, my story about HUC is about the cover art. This was my first Silhouette Intimate Moments — it was a rather new experience all around.

I received my printout of something called “Author Alterations,” which at the time (1993!) was an extremely bad carbon of a dot matrix printing of the copy edited version of my manuscript. It was very hard to read and on top of that I had a neat little gift from my son — conjunctivitis. I was on a deadline, so I sat down to peer at it through my blurry, bleary eyes, to check for typos and any unacceptable changes that the copy editor might have made.

Halfway through this arduous task, I got a phone call from my editor, who had just seen the cover art for this book. “I have good news and bad news,” she told me. The good news was that she thought the cover was a good one. (I’ll let you make your own opinion about that!) The bad news was that the heroine was not a blonde.

Now, when I wrote this book, I envisioned Annie Morrow as being a California blonde. You know — long, straight, extremely light blond hair. Kind of like Julie on The Mod Squad.

My editor told me I had two options. The first was they could send the cover back to the art department, and they could paint over the photo to make her hair lighter…but, oh, by the way, when they do that, it usually looks really bad. Or… (And can you guess right now that I was already bracing myself to do option two, even before I heard what it was?!) I could go through the manuscript and change the color of my heroine’s hair. I could make her a brunette instead of a blonde.

And yes. I did it.