A Sweeping Tale of Passion and Plumbing

I promised the Royal Road crowd I would tell this story once the dust settled. The dust has settled. So here it is.

I made a cover for Master Pipe Layer. If you have seen it, you already know. If you have not, let me set the scene. A man in a billowing white shirt, unbuttoned to whatever the 1990s considered structurally necessary, with long flowing hair the wind clearly encouraged. A redhead swooning backward into his arms in a gold satin gown that is losing a slow, dramatic battle with gravity, a magenta scarf whipping around them both like it has an appointment. Both of them, and I cannot stress this enough, wearing full tattoo sleeves, because nothing says timeless windswept period romance like modern ink. A beach. A sunset. A tiny sailboat minding its own business. An ornate gold border doing the absolute most. And a subtitle, in cursive foil, that reads, and I want to be clear that I wrote this on purpose: A Sweeping Tale of Passion and Plumbing.

It is a joke. It is a loud, deliberate, gold-foil joke. The whole book is trolling this exact cover. You are promised a bodice-ripper and you are handed four hundred pages about a woman fixing a town’s water system with a pipe wrench and a bad attitude. The cover writes a check the book gleefully refuses to cash.

Here is the thing nobody warned me about. People take one look at that man’s open shirt and the words “Master Pipe Layer” and assume the book is four hundred pages of heaving everything. The title is a triple entendre and readers only ever land on the filthy one. The cover is satire, the title is satire, the subtitle literally says “and Plumbing,” and the assumption is still, universally, smut.

So naturally I posted it to r/litrpg like a person with a functioning sense of humor.

It lasted about as long as you would expect.

The post got yanked. Two flags. One for self-promotion, which was adorable, because r/litrpg lets you self-promote once a week and I was comfortably inside my window, waiting my turn like a civilized person. The other flag was NSFW.

Let me sit in that one. A cover that is making fun of horny paperback covers, a cover on which the man is fully wearing a shirt, got reported as Not Safe For Work. The book has zero sex in it. The cover is a parody of the covers that do. I got flagged for the joke by the exact reflex the joke is about. I could not have designed that outcome if I had tried, and believe me, going forward, I will try.

So I did the responsible thing. I messaged the mods. I pointed out that I was within my weekly self-promo window, and that the cover is AI, which I had already disclosed in the post, and that it is satire, and that the book is nothing like the cover, that being the entire bit. I was polite. I did not use all caps. This was a genuine feat of personal restraint.

And the mods are actually great. They read it, they got it, they put the post back. Total time in the penalty box: about two hours. I have waited longer for a table at Cracker Barrel.

Here is why I am telling you instead of quietly moving on. The cover did its job. Its job is to make you look twice and go “wait, what.” An automated flag reflex looked twice and went “wait, what.” Every reader who picks it up does the same. The bot and my target audience had the identical reaction. I just needed the bot to keep scrolling.

If you came here for the tattoos and the open shirt, I have wonderful and disappointing news. The book with the filthy cover is the cleanest thing I have ever written. And the two that look perfectly respectable, the space opera and the ancient-war epic, are where I hid all the trouble. I built an entire catalog to be judged by its cover and then be completely wrong about it. On purpose.

So stay for the pipe fitting. Then go find the smut where you least expect it. It is closer than you think.