Oh, this was very interesting: a question about the artwork in the guide.
Well, the difficulty with the pictures was something that I did not discover until far too late, the artist who was hired to do the pictures… see, this was done by a packager. Someone who came to me, and done guides before, and came to me and said, “I would like to do this, and here is one I did for Marion Zimmer Bradley, and here’s the one I did for Bob Silverberg, and here’s the one I did for Jack Vance, and would you, you know…”
I said alright, this looks good, and I called up these people and they said that things went well, but my publisher…the artist was hired to do a certain number of black and white drawings. And as soon as this guy got the package together he went to my publisher, my … who said yeah, I’d like to publish this. And my publisher said, “No, I’d like to have color drawings, not black and white, and you want to do x number of drawings, but I would like five times as many illustrations.”
And that was all good, except that the artist contract…what I did not know was that the artist contract called for a flat fee. And the man who put the package together did not increase the amount of money that he was going to pay the artist. The artist was then asked to do five times as many drawings, in color, instead of in black and white for the same amount of money. His enthusiasm dwindled. [laughter] Now if I had known about this, I would have given the artist some money out of my own pocket, to get better pictures. I couldn’t understand why the man who had sat in my study, and drawn such wonderful sketches just from my off-the-cuff descriptions, was suddenly making drawings that seemed very…not very good. But, that was the reason.
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