A Crowd Favorite: Book Covers!
Art, meet Market.
I just returned from a whirlwind Austin trip. It’s not the first time my wife and I have visited her home turf, and usually, we buy a few stickers and a box of Longhorns at the airport. This time we bought a house. Or, it will be a house eventually; right now it’s a scrape of soil and a dumpster full of construction debris. One thing that writing a novel teaches you is how to see the future in a mess.
On the book front, I was overwhelmingly excited to hear audio clips from the voice actors who will read the audiobook. The outstanding Victoria Nassif will be the voice of Betty, my narrator, and Haneen Arafat Murphy is channeling Nuha straight from my imagination. I love audiobooks, and my heart basically melted out of my chest when I heard the novel brought to new life in this incarnation. If I ever read my own novel again when all of the hubbub is over, I’ll definitely choose the audiobook.
Before diving into the milestones of cover art, I also want to ask you to save some dates! More events will be announced soon.
My April 25 launch reading will be a free, hybrid in-person/virtual event at East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C., where I will be in conversation with literary superhero and bookstagrammer Lupita Aquino. RSVP now on Eventbrite!
If on May 3 you happen to be in the New York metro area, I’ll be at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. Details to follow.
On May 4 at 7 p.m., I’ll be giving a free virtual event at the Writer’s Center in conversation Zach Powers. RSVP here.
And in Pittsburgh on May 5, I’ll read at White Whale Books (and it’s also my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary).
A Book Cover Is Art with Constraints
The received wisdom is that when you’re a debut author at a Big Five publisher, your input on the cover is minimal. You don’t have clout or experience, and the publisher will ask for feedback as a formality, but the process is out of your control. A book has to stand out in fast-scrolling feeds on tiny screens, and design is fickle and fast-changing too. It’s why a novel gets a different cover in every country that publishes it, and no one expects a first-time author to contribute much. And goddess, spare us from diva delays.
None of this was my experience. My editor, Chelcee Johns, set a meeting specifically to talk about my vision for the cover. She was explicit that my enthusiasm for the final design was essential because nobody wants the writer to shy away from showing off a cover that embarrasses them. And all along the road to its launch, a book is exposed to early feedback on Goodreads, Edelweiss, and NetGalley, where a thumbs-down rating can dampen other readers’ interest in the book. Don’t know what Edelweiss and NetGalley are? Neither did I, not really, and I’ll get to them in a sec.
It’s probably easiest to start with the bottom line up front (and with images displayed, if you’re reading this as an email message). Here’s my book cover:
I presented the image in a small size for a reason. You can still read the words. It has bright colors relevant to the story. It’s kind of weird and physical, not just in the woman’s blue skin, nudity, and come-hither pose, but she’s also got a giant gazelle head and tall squiggly horns. This all resonates with a motif in the novel, as well as the novel’s fabulist conceit of a blue-skinned narrator, and the many ways bodies assert their demands, create obstacles, and act as sites of pleasure.
It jumped out at me from the three possibilities the designer created, and we made a few refinements. For instance, the horns needed to look a little more like a gazelle’s and the face become slimmer. My name used to be larger and part of the descending vertical text, but it was also a lot harder to read. These were all comments embedded in my otherwise immensely positive feedback, which I discussed first with my agent and then shared with Chelcee. By the time the manuscript entered the copyediting stage in late May 2022, we had a final design we loved. But how did it get here and what can you learn from the process?
Gathering Inspiration
Chelcee asked for five to seven other book covers I liked, just to get a sense of what look and feel appealed to me. I’m an overachiever who loves website design, so I added a private/unlinked page to my existing Squarespace website that displayed a gallery of over a dozen covers. Chelcee and Adam (agent) also contributed five or six each, and we observed some overlap. Frequent themes were animals, bold colors, strong lines, and certain appealing shades of blue. I also like intricate, “fairytale-ish” designs too.
Want to see our ideas? Click here.
I also loved Yves Klein blue. (This article talks about blue helpfully.) Some art had stuck with me for years as I was working on the manuscript:
When Chelcee and I spoke in January, she also displayed a piece of art she kept by her desk: a large wooden animal mask big enough to fit over someone’s head. Together, we had our inspiration.
A Sticky Subplot: Will the Title Change?
Throughout the four months that passed between this conversation and the draft designs, I wasn’t sure if the publisher would keep The Skin and Its Girl as my novel’s title. When Penguin Random House had presented it at a sales conference (a biannual get-together for all the corporate book buyers like Costco, Barnes & Noble, and more), some sales reps were worried the title was too esoteric. And when sales reps are worried, they expect fewer sales and buy fewer books (if any), the book becomes harder for readers to find, and it likely sells fewer copies and has a smaller audience. That isn’t a dream scenario.
What all this meant for the book cover was that if we kept my title, the cover design might need to be more conventional. If the title were made more conventional, then the cover could be free to get weird. I personally wanted ALL THE WEIRD, but I was prepared to do my part to help the book find its audience. Feeling uncertain and in need of a second, third, and twentieth opinion, I created another website page with a bunch of other titles and shared it with friends.
The results were clear: The Skin and Its Girl was the favorite, trailed at a distance by…others. You don’t want to know.
Months passed. We’d had the cover meeting. I did other things—worked on my author questionnaire, tried to get permission to use a translated poem for my epigraph, proposed a panel for AWP, finished a round of ends, searched for an indie publicist, brainstormed blurbers, and worked on the next novel in preparation for a summer residency (all fodder for future Substack posts). Then in May, the design drafts came in. All three used The Skin and Its Girl.
“Does this mean we’re keeping it?” I asked in a meeting with Chelcee and Adam.
Indeed, we were keeping it.
Reveals Are Your Book’s “Soft Opening”
Cover reveals are a big deal. Writers hype them in advance, set a date, share preorder links, and plan their social media calendars around them. It’s the first time your book gets to show its face, and you want the announcement to feel festive. It’s sort of like when a new restaurant does its soft opening—customers are welcome, but the ribbon-cutting ceremony is still a few months away.
The reveal for The Skin and Its Girl was a bit slower, however. Partly, the delay was due to the time of year (August is when nothing happens in publishing), and partly, it was because we had all started early and met our deadlines, and late summer 2022 was just too soon to start hyping the book. It didn’t have a preorder link yet, was still collecting early praise, and Penguin Random House’s various social media gurus needed to design pretty things for my socials. I didn’t meet the marketing and publicity teams until September. And this is only what I saw from the outside; more work was happening internally, out of my sight.
Ultimately, cover reveals happen when the sales and publicity infrastructures are ready to (literally) capitalize on readers’ early interest. Book review sites like NetGalley distribute the ebook to potential reviewers and media contacts, so they need the cover in advance. They also allow site users to rate the design, and the ratings are an early harbinger of any problems at the design–market interface, leaving time for adjustments. The book also shows up on bookstore- and library-facing sites like Edelweiss, and on reader-facing sites like Goodreads. All of these places exist to generate interest, awareness, and preorders—and those website pages need to be live and ready to go when people start clicking.
I used to think a book’s success was determined by sales after its launch, but I was naïve. From the publisher’s standpoint, individual sales, bookstore orders, and library orders stacking up before the book is even available are all a MUST. It costs a lot to make a book. Publicity and marketing are a way to recoup the expense, and these processes are designed to create early returns.
All this infrastructure supported the moment when I revealed the cover to my online community—a large group consisting of clients, a non-superstar number of social media followers, family, and friends. Just posting a screenshot of the cover didn’t feel adequate. I gave myself over a month to plan the posts, organize my ~1,000 email contacts, compose an announcement, draft a newsletter for clients, redesign my author website, and build and load content for this Substack. When I went online with the cover image on November 1, 2022, I wanted to respect the amount of work the publisher had already done and maximize the chance of people seeing a consistent message everywhere. Short of enlarging the book cover and applying it to the front of my house with a paint roller, I felt like I did a reasonable amount of stuff.
The design had been finished for six months already, but the delay helped make the reveal a success: for about two days, The Skin and Its Girl was a #1 seller in its category on Amazon.
Conclusion
It’s February, and I just saw the full hardcover book jacket—front, spine, back, and flaps. It’s been a year since the conversation started, and it has been an unconditionally positive process.
Maybe you aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I love the design so much that I sort of hope people do (and then read what’s inside).
TRUTH on book covers. Eons ago, at the library, when I was looking for another fantasy book to read, I found one called The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams. The cover alone (Michael Whelan) is what made me read the book and now Tad is one of my favorite writers. All because of one amazing book cover.