The Name Change:
"When Macmillan republished it they said that...if you have a story with the name of a car in the title, girls won’t read it...I wasn’t particularly keen on the title The White Mercedes in the first place, but they told me it would help sell lots more copies if we called it The Butterfly Tattoo. Being unmotivated by anything but the highest motives I thought ‘jolly good, more money!’ so I agreed to it. But in fact it hasn’t done as well as it did when it was called The White Mercedes, so I think they were wrong."
--Philip Pullman, in an interview with T. Brown in August 2000.

The Content:
"I won’t say ‘censored’ in [Great Britain], but [the publisher] suggested I tone down the sex scene a bit in this country. So I did, because the story didn’t entirely depend on the graphic qualities of the sex scene. But they didn’t suggest that in the States. In the States, you see, they have this category called ‘Young Adult’, and ‘young adult’ books can be full of sex, violence, rude language - whatever you like. If they’re called ‘teenage’ books or ‘children’s’ books [publishers] have to be very much more fussy about it, but because it was marketed as young adult I could be as rude as I liked. "
--Philip Pullman, in an interview with T. Brown in August 2000.