The brief, contentious, and ultimately fruitless relationship between poet Stacey Lynn Brown and the editors of Cider Press, the nine-year-old independent publisher based in Halifax, Pennsylvania, that publishes Cider Press Review and sponsors the annual Cider Press Review Book Award, points to an essential question that pops up often in literary publishing: Whose opinion—author's or publisher's—should matter most when it comes to finalizing the product that enters the marketplace as a book?

In this case, Cradle Song, which was chosen by final judge Tony Hoagland as winner of the press's 2007 award, didn't make it to the marketplace because the relationship between poet and publisher, marred by multiple miscommunications stemming from disputes primarily about the book's design—an area that coeditors Caron Andregg and Robert Wynne both assert is the purview of the press, not the poet—ended in late July when Cider Press revoked the award and asked Brown to return the prize money. Brown retained a lawyer who threatened litigation; both parties subsequently signed a release that allowed Brown to keep the money and recover the rights to her book.

The events leading to such an ignoble end to what is typically an exciting period in a writer's life are fresh grist for the ongoing debate about what should happen after a book is accepted for publication: Who should have final approval over a book's content and design—the author, who is the ultimate authority on the text, or the publisher, who knows how best to present that text to readers? The question takes on added significance in the small press arena, where contracts are often less formal than those used in commercial publishing. It is further complicated by a contest model that leads many authors to assume that when their book wins an award, the judge has deemed it perfect, and it will therefore be published as is. Most publishers, however, see it as their role and prerogative to edit the manuscript—whether it has won a contest or not—and certainly to decide how the book appears. In fact, unless a contract specifically states otherwise, the final decisions on both editing and design almost always reside with the press. Of course, how a publisher negotiates these potentially delicate decisions with the author varies.

Shortly after receiving the news that Cradle Song had won the award, which is given for an unpublished manuscript of forty-eight to eighty pages and requires a twenty-five-dollar entry fee, Brown, who lives in Edwardsville, Illinois, signed a contract stating that Cider Press would publish the book in 2009 and give the poet a one-thousand-dollar cash prize in lieu of royalties. Brown was required to, among other things, deliver the text of the book, an author photo, an author bio, and back-cover blurbs, as well as "contact Cider Press Review editors with any questions." In hindsight, Andregg admits the agreement is "not the best-written contract in the world." Coeditor Wynne agrees, saying, "As a two-person operation we don't have a lot of money or time to spend on working through long-winded documents, so we had something brief that we thought would suffice."

According to the contract, Cider Press agreed to "design both cover and book" and asserted that "all final editorial decisions remain the prerogative of the publishers." In addition, the editors asked Brown to approve the proof of the typeset manuscript; Brown did not comply because she says she was asked to sign off on pages with errors that had not yet been corrected. Wynne says the approval process was something they instituted after a dispute with Anne Caston, winner of the 2006 Cider Press Review Book Award, who took legal action against the press after the publication of her collection Judah's Lion. (Caston negotiated a settlement that includes a disclosure agreement stating neither she nor the editors may discuss the terms of the settlement or the events leading up to it. "I do not wish the press nor its editors any ill will as a result of that situation," Caston wrote in an e-mail. "It was never my intention—and still isn't—to cause public harm or embarrassment to a small press.")

Midway through the production process of Brown's book—after a few months in which both parties were cordially ironing out details such as using a painting the author chose for the cover (she offered to pay half of the four-hundred-dollar licensing fee) and the addition of an out-of-print clause that was not in the original contract—there arose fundamental differences in each party's understanding of its responsibilities. Andregg says she explained to Brown early on that the author's primary role was "basically to ensure the integrity of the manuscript, making sure [it] gets translated into the book properly," while the purview of the editors was "the book as a physical object—the cover and the layout and the editorial decisions that go with that." In a March 2 e-mail to Andregg regarding the licensing fee, Brown seemed to agree, writing, "As far as I'm concerned, we're in this together, and I, too, have some responsibility in terms of making the book into what I want it to be. (Not final editorial say, mind you. Just responsibility.)"

Although Brown says she spent countless hours "correcting the ways in which the editor messed up that manuscript," citing formatting mistakes such as missing italics, misplaced underlining, and incorrect punctuation, her main objection involved the book's layout and design. In late June, Andregg sent Brown the table of contents for her book—essentially one long poem in sections—and Brown disagreed with how titles were assigned to some of the sections. During an exchange of charged e-mails that stretched into early July, both parties raised the issue of editorial authority. "TOC is a book editing issue, so Robert and I will sort it out so that it's consistent one way or another," Andregg wrote on July 1. "Please just let the editors do the editing, okay?" Later that day Brown replied: "I understand that you feel that the TOC is an editing issue, but the vision and content of this book, a book-length poem in sections with no individual poem titles, is my arena, and I can't go along with the idea of putting those labels in the TOC as if they were titles." Despite rising tensions—exacerbated, Brown says, by her decision to turn down an offer by Andregg to design her Web site, although Andregg says it had no influence on the press's decisions—Cider Press acquiesced to Brown's TOC ideas, and the focus turned to the back cover.

Brown had supplied blurbs from Rodney Jones, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Major Jackson, but on July 14, when Andregg sent Brown a mock-up of the back cover featuring edited versions of the blurbs, Brown rejected it. "They had cut [the blurbs] and chopped them, slashed them together," Brown says, acknowledging that she understands blurbs are often edited by publishers. However, she points out, one of the blurb authors explicitly requested that it not be edited. Why didn't Brown ask for approval from the other two authors? "That presupposes that at that point we had a functional working relationship," Brown says of her rapport with Cider Press. "After the Web site and spacing and editing and table of contents disagreements, things had degenerated into a full-on power struggle." She adds that she feared such a request might offend the blurb authors, and that there remained other solutions. Wynne, who says the blurbs were edited in order to accommodate other elements on the back cover, claims that Brown told them she couldn't contact the authors of the blurbs "because it's horribly unprofessional."

Instead, Andregg restored the complete blurbs and moved Brown's author photo and bio to the inside of the book. Wynne (who around this time took over the correspondence with Brown because, as he puts it, "I'm a little better at calming people down than Caron is") sent Brown the revised cover on July 16. Brown didn't like the revision, and suggested the press instead cut a five-sentence description of the Cider Press Review Book Award that appeared on the back cover in order to solve the problem. "We really need to leave the contest information on the back cover in order to make it more visible for potential future entrants," Wynne replied. "I hope you can appreciate that our interests, as well as yours, need to be taken into account when it comes to the design—and not the content—of the book."

While award information is typically reserved for the interior of the book, it is within Cider Press's rights to insist this element—not dissimilar from the logos, contact information, names of series editors, and other information incorporated into the design by other presses—remain on the book. (The editors say it has been a part of each of the three previous award winners' book designs.)

Brown then made a series of appeals to the editors, suggesting they try to fit her author photo, bio, unedited blurbs, and award information on the back cover. "Can we at least try?" she asked, to which Wynne wrote, "We can make space for the photo if we edit the blurbs, but that will be the only way."

The e-mail correspondence slowly devolved from there: Brown opposed the press's contacting the authors of the blurbs (standard procedure at many publishers); Wynne drew a line in the sand between editorial and design decisions "not tied to the content of the book"; and Brown labeled the press's decision to put award information on the back cover as "self-serving and disrespectful."

"You are overstepping your bounds with this repeated request," wrote Wynne in one e-mail, while Brown called the award information on the back cover "outrageous" in another. Finally, she added that the press already had a bad reputation with poets because of the Caston situation and that she wouldn't sign off on the book until an acceptable compromise had been reached.

"When I received that," says Wynne, "I called Caron on the phone and I told her that I felt we should sever our relationship with Stacey Brown, that we weren't going to benefit from pursuing this any further." On July 19, just five days after the dispute over the cover design began—during which time all communication was made through e-mail—the editors sent Brown a letter stating that because she was "attempting to control every aspect of the book's design" and refusing "to move forward with publication simply because your picture is not featured on the back cover," they concluded that she was unable to "comply with the requirements" of the signed contract and revoked the award, asking that she return the thousand dollars in prize money, plus the two hundred dollars spent securing artwork for the cover. The editors went on to say that the contract between Cider Press and Brown remained "valid and in effect." Should Brown repay the twelve hundred dollars, the editors wrote, the rights to Cradle Song would be transferred back to her.

The contract, however, makes no mention of Brown's having ultimate approval over the final design of the book. So why didn't Andregg and Wynne simply ignore Brown's continued reluctance and go to press with the version of the book they thought was best? "She had poisoned the well," says Andregg. Wynne says the decision was based partly on wanting to avoid the experience they had with the prior book contest ("which I cannot for legal reasons detail," he says), where there were issues with the author postpublication. "We really felt in many ways disrespected and wronged by how Ms. Brown handled this. From an emotional standpoint, honestly, we did not want to continue working with her in any way. And I don't think that's an unfair response, given how things went down."

"I never saw it coming," says Brown of the revocation of her award. "I had made a commitment to them...and I had withdrawn the book from four other contests in which it was a finalist. We were in it together, and I just assumed we would work out a compromise—or not. Maybe they would just go ahead with the book, as was their right, and I would just be grumbly about not having my picture on it."

"A book is the work of many hands," says Copper Canyon Press's executive editor, Michael Wiegers, of the collaborative spirit that is the hallmark of a successful author-publisher relationship. "I think that there needs to be a lot of give-and-take, and just as the editor needs to respect the poet's work, the poet needs to respect the editor's work and realize they are coming at it with a degree of experience. As an editor, you've got to be your author's best advocate, but as an author you can't micromanage; otherwise, self-publish."

Indeed, after Brown posted her perspective on the situation on her blog in late August, some of the poets who contributed to the ensuing discussion in the blogosphere suggested alternatives to book awards, including starting one's own press and print on demand. Of course, the lamentable details of one author-publisher relationship needn't sour the contest experience for all writers, but at the very least, authors should carefully research the presses that sponsor those contests to which they submit their work. Such research includes taking a look at the books those presses have published—if only to make sure the back covers are designed to their liking—and even asking previous winners about their experience, including the level of input they had in editorial and design decisions. "If I had it to do over again, I would have researched the press more carefully," says Brown, who purchased Cider Press's first two titles after she found out she had won the award.

"Some poets would have gone along with it, I know," Brown adds. "Those people surely think I'm a fool for arguing about things like keeping blurbs intact because for a lot of people, just getting the book is the goal. For me, the goal was to get the book right."

"It was a learning experience for us," says Wynne. "But at the same time, it's very frustrating and saddening to me that some authors don't appreciate the joy and wonder and accomplishment of getting their work published.... We're updating the contract, and the money she spent to threaten us with legal action ended up benefiting us because we got a very detailed account of what was wrong with our contract from her lawyer."

Shortly after revoking Brown's award, Wynne and Andregg named Robin Chapman, who was one of seven other finalists, the new winner of the 2007 contest. Her collection Abundance is scheduled for publication next February. A little over a month after Cradle Song was orphaned, the book was picked up by C&R Press in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It will be published next January.

Kevin Larimer is the deputy editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.