Loving Time

acknowledgments

Readers are often surprised to learn that it takes almost a year for a manuscript to travel from an author’s desk through its many stages of production until it finally becomes the book they’ve been waiting to buy. The process begins with editorial Close Encounters of the Third Kind, moves right along through many scheduling, marketing, promotion, and sales conferences. The pages themselves go through a complicated copyediting, production, book design, and printing process. Meanwhile, the difficult packaging decisions are made and realized, the cover design, cover art, and copy are completed.

A beautifully produced book is the author’s dearest wish. For fulfillment, it requires the work of dozens of gifted people. Bantam has an editorial, production, packaging, marketing, and promotion dream team. Thank you especially, the truly daring and visionary Publisher, Irwyn Applebaum, and world’s most challenging and supportive Associate Publisher—my brilliant editor—Kate Miciak. Thank you Managing Editor Susie West for production orchestration; Jamie Warren Youll for gorgeous cover designs, Betsy Hulsebosch for marketing, Barbara Burg for publicity, and my publicist, Susan Corcoran. Thank you Linda Biagi for foreign sales.

But, wait a minute! Before a single book can appear in a store, another powerful group of Bantam people have to go to work: The Mighty Bantam Sales Force, which comprises the true, and not-often-enough-sung, heroes of publishing. This is the Force to which we authors pray every night: “May the Force be with me.” Thank you especially, Sally Johnson, Central District Manager, who said the magic words at the right moment, as well as Bantam Salesperson Cinda Van Deursen in the Eastern District; David Glenn and A. Scott LePine in the Western District. Thank you Telemarketers and those in Special Markets and National Accounts, and everybody else who gets those books out there and tells them not to come home again.

For help with the fictional Psychiatric Centre in LOVING TIME, and the field of psychiatry, thanks to Richard C. Friedman, M.D., gender expert, psychology professor, and consultant extraordinaire.