Back matter for nonfiction picture books: an example

 A Boy Who Made Music is my first nonfiction picture book. Nonfiction picture books typically have back matter, providing more information for those sufficiently interested in the subject. This book provided my first opportunity to give informative back matter a try. (Well, almost my first. I added a note at the end of Where Fireflies Sleep to clarify a point I'd arguably fudged.)

I didn't want to switch from fully illustrated two-page spreads to stark text-only pages, so my obliging illustrator Tomasz Mikutel provided a host of "spot illustrations" for me to sprinkle through the back matter as I saw fit. The page I'm including below (the first of three) shows how I made use of those illustrations.

Did I make the right decisions about what to italicize? I don't know and at this point, I have no intention of worrying about it. (Unfortunately, worrying doesn't always require an intention. But I'll try to avoid it.)

Meanwhile, I continue to wait for that spelling correction to go through. Care to cross your fingers along with me?

Arrrghhh, spelling: the drama of last-minute corrections

 I've been getting ready for next Sunday's release of my first nonfiction picture book, A Boy Who Made Music: The Extraordinary Life of Joaquin Rodrigo. (I'm not including the link, because for logistical reasons I'll get into shortly, I'd rather you buy the book, if so inclined, after the current situation gets untangled.) The story is inherently dramatic: Rodrigo went almost entirely blind at the age of three, learned to love music, and became an internationally famous composer. (You may have heard his wonderful and most popular composition, "Concierto de Aranjez." Here's one of innumerable performances.)

It's a challenging story to tell in picture book form: how do you illustrate a story that essentially begins with blindness? Watercolor artist Tomasz Mikutel and I took a symbolic approach, changing from color illustrations to black and white at the moment Rodrigo and the reader discovers the consequences of his illness.

It seemed to me that public libraries were likely to be interested in Rodrigo's story, and in this picture book treatment of it in particular. So I found a list of all the public libraries in Indiana (figuring that being an Indiana author wouldn't hurt), and started contacting them. I heard back from some librarians, and one or two asked to see an ARC (advance review copy or advance reader copy, depending which basis for the acronym one prefers) before they made up their minds.

And then, one librarian who had formerly been a copy editor emailed me with many appreciative comments on the book (calling it "a great story, well written, with attractive illustrations and valuable back matter​"), asked me whether the hardcover edition would have the title on the spine (yes) . . . and pointing out that I'd misspelled "diphtheria." Somehow, I'd never noticed that (IMHO) annoying and unnecessary first "h."

I got this email on July 25th. Next Sunday, the release date, is August 4th.

Yikes.

I'm the one who put the text on Tomasz's illustrations, so I had the multilayer files and could do some chopping and rearranging and copying and pasting to add that pesky "h." Then I had to do the formatting for the various editions (Kindle, paperback, hardcover) for the various editions. (Whoops -- that reminds me I need to notify the folks handling the braille edition!) Next came the easy part: uploading the corrected files to Amazon's KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) arm. That's all taken care of.

The last phase: uploading the new files to IngramSpark, which prints paperbacks and hardcovers and distributes them to a host of retailers, online and bricks-and-mortar. Their process is a good deal more cumbersome than KDP's. Adding to that complexity is some otherwise positive news: I've had some preorders, and IngramSpark prints those before even looking at submitted revisions.

So I'm waiting and hoping. Waiting for an email saying that IngramSpark has processed the new files and has an electronic proof for me to approve; hoping it happens before August 4th, and that this snafu won't lead to a period when one or more retailers shows the book as unavailable. And while I'm waiting, I'm going to share one of the two corrected spreads in the book, just in case it takes longer than planned for it to hit (virtual and other) shelves.

I'll be back soon with more about the book!

Wearing Both My Lawyer and Author Hats to Examine Justice Sotomayor's Hypothetical

 These days, I blog mostly about books and publishing. But I'm still a lawyer, though quasi-retired, and I have an abiding interest in constitutional law. Combine that interest with an author's habit of asking "what if" -- especially an author, sometimes, of science fiction -- and you get this attempt to examine Justice Sotomayor's dissent in the recent decision on presidential immunity.

Justice Sotomayor opined that under the majority decision, a president could order Seal Time 6 to assassinate a political rival and be forever immune from prosecution for so doing. Various legal commentators have dismissed this assertion with words like "preposterous." It would certainly be more comfortable to do so. But I believe her hypothetical deserves more serious examination.

First, a brief recap of a few key points in the majority opinion. According to the Justices in the majority, the basic structure of the constitution assumes an energetic president, unrestrained by fears of what his political opponents may do the moment he leaves office. Accordingly, when he exercises his "core constitutional powers" -- that is, "within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority" -- he is absolutely immune from later prosecution for doing so. And when he acts "within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility, he has "at least presumptive immunity." The former category apparently includes authority that is typically delegated to various people within the president's administration, or else the majority would not have stated several times that authority exclusive to "the Executive Branch" is covered by this absolute immunity.

The basis for the hypothetical is the president's status as Commander in Chief. The president can give orders to military personnel. Arguably, this is authority accorded exclusively to the president, or at least those within the Executive Branch -- if the various military personnel who give orders to those lower in the chain of command may be so defined. If, by giving orders to members of the military, the president is acting "within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority," then he would (gulp) have not merely presumptive, but absolute immunity for those orders,  no matter their motivation. If this analysis is correct, even issuing a presidential order that is "illegal" under military law could not be criminally prosecuted.

If this hypothetical order somehow does not fall within the "exclusive" presidential sphere, but is instead an official act "within the outer perimeter" of presidential responsibilities, then it may be possible to rebut the presumption of immunity -- though the Court didn't actually rule that immunity in this context is only presumptive, saying rather that it didn't need to decide that question given the state of the record. If, in fact, official acts of this kind are only presumptively immune, how may that presumption be rebutted? The majority indicates that the  prosecution may attempt to prove that the conduct in question "does not pose dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch" (internal quotations  omitted). 

What about motive? Where would a president's reason for arranging a military assassination fit in? It may not, the Court held, be used to distinguish "official" from "unofficial" conduct. "Such an inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose, thereby intruding on the Article II interests that immunity seeks to protect." However, it may be inferred that once conduct is conceded to be official, motive may be called upon to rebut the presumption of immunity, if in fact later rulings confirm that such rebuttal is allowed.

So where does all this analysis leave Justice Sotomayor's hypothetical? It seems to me that should a president indulge in political assassination by means of the military, any future prosecutor would need to argue first -- and I don't, at first glance, quite see how -- that giving orders to military personnel to kill someone is not within his core constitutional powers. If the prosecutor prevails on that point, and if no future Supreme Court opinion  has eliminated the possibility of rebutting the presumption of immunity for official acts outside that category, then we may all relax, trusting that the motive will constitute a sufficient rebuttal. But at this early stage of absorbing the decision, as we wait to see how it is applied in the future, we can hardly fault the Justice for treating the outcome as something less than guaranteed.