A Cover Story, part 1

During lockdown, when everyone reached for something to console and guide them, I retreated to the warm embrace of Jessica Fletcher. The show Murder, She Wrote was a central feature in my childhood. Mystery author Ms. Fletcher, or Jess if you are familiar, navigated her career as a blockbuster author while solving murders and being insanely attractive to older bachelors around the world.

It’s delightful. If you haven’t watched, maybe we’ll get another nasty variant and you’ll be stuck at home and it can soothe you as it soothed me.

Anyway, one particular episode opens with Jessica visiting her publisher’s office to view cover options for her next book. She offers her opinion and the story moves on.

I chuckled, sadly. For many authors, they never see the cover until marketing has begun. Their twitter posts are dire. “Hey, I guess I have a cover!”, sometimes followed by discrete complaints in the future about the cover. In these cases, the covers aren’t shared with the authors in advance, let alone feedback requested and gathered.

For all the faults of self-publishing, I have complete control over the cover. LIFELESS and both the original (and new) WHEN THE WAVE COLLAPSES covers are beautiful. I have a framed copy of the LIFELESS cover and visitors think it is a painting. Illustrator Kate O’Hara is pure talent.

THE CONTROL PROBLEM is in first-person POV, and the world is limited to her immediate sphere. It felt important to have her, or a representation of her, on the cover. Early this year, I hired a book cover artist who had quite a few covers that felt like a stylistic fit. We locked in our date well in advance and I worked towards getting the book out of editing in time.

I’m not sure what went wrong, exactly. If it was poor communication on my part, time zone issues, overwork on their part, or a combination, but it went wrong quickly. I had waited months to begin this process and the first, second, and third proposals were the opposite of what the book needed. Weeks went by, my publication date was creeping up on me, and input from friends and family on how to structure my feedback still got me nowhere. It was clear that this was a failed process. I offered to pay what the designer thought was fair to end the process, which ended up being nearly the full contract amount.

I pushed back my publication date for THE CONTROL PROBLEM to December. I looked at stock images I might buy, as if a good enough image could compensate for my incompetence.

My husband offered to help. He has designed everything from bus maps to film festival posters to some things you may have heard of. He has wanted to do a cover for me for years, but I hesitated. I was already leaning on him to manage almost everything at home while I finished this book, and to then ask him to do five different book cover iterations using platforms that are frankly hostile to use, plus whatever marketing images I might need, was too much.

I reached out to several more cover artists. The earliest availability was February 2023.

At this point, I wanted to be done with this shit. I wanted to wake up to an email that said, ‘Here’s your cover!’ even if it was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. But, no email was coming to save me. This is the problem with having total ownership of my publishing process. I also have total responsibility.

In the end, I took Jacob up on his offer and the result was, of course, amazing. My next post will describe how that process went.