When You Choose a Book Cover

Book two in my Macy McVannel series is getting close to press time. It is not the book I was doing in the behind the scenes articles, that particular book is book three. I will get back to it in a couple of months or so.

The cover for Crossing the Line speaks more to the content of the book, than to its characters. I had the choice of putting Macy on the cover of this book, too. I chose not to. She was on the cover of book one. Book one introduced her; she should have been there. It made perfect sense. I sure didn't want to have someone pick up book two, see a different picture of Macy and think, Oh i read this. While continuity is good, confusion is not.

Crossing the Line deal with the dark side of bullying. The side you never hear about until tragedy strikes. The part you try to insulate your own children from. Bullying that robs children of their innocence long before they should lose it.

There is nothing pretty or exciting about bullying. It happens everywhere, schools, workplaces, in public and in private. It has become epidemic in our country. We need to address it. I took the fictional way of presenting it. It's going to be up to my readers to take a hard look at what is happening around them and do something.

The original goal for this book was to donate ten percent of my earnings from it to an anti-bullying project. I have one in mind. Ten percent sounds like a lot of money. It's not. It's about $1.06/per book. It only ads up after I sell lots of books. However any donation of any size to an anti-bullying organization is a good one.

I was a teacher. Bullying goes on in schools. Student to student bullying is the most prevalent. Teachers only have so much recourse as in my ways their hands have been tied. Reporting it, working to prevent it are the top two things we can do. But what happpens when it's a teacher bullying a student? Still it has to be reported. I could be a teacher bullying a teacher. It could be the principal bullying a teacher. It depends on where you are perceived to be on the food chain in an organization as to whether or not you get bullied. It has nothing to do with whether or not you are a nice person.

We usually hear about bullying when there is a school shooting or a child commits suicide. The two are connected. Bullying was at the root of the Columbine School Shooting. Two boys who had finally had enough. Was it the right thing to do? Never. My question is why didn't the adults who must have seen some of the bullying try to intervene? No, I am not placing blame. I am just asking a question.

Most schools in the United States are required to have an anti-bullying policy. Does your child's school have one? Do you have a copy? Do you know the steps to follow? Better yet, does the staff know the steps to follow? Are your children aware of the policy and its consequences? Does the policy have consequences? Those are big things to know if you are concerned about bullying in your child's school.

So, choosing this cover is a content issue not one of character.