My Book Has a Cover!

The saga of collaborative cover design and the promise a good cover offers

Happy Full Moon, folks! Today’s moon is the Flower Moon, but apparently it is also a Buddhist festival, Vesak, which commemorates the Buddha’s birthday and attainment of enlightenment. So may we all find some insights and enlightenment during this month’s full moon moment!

My update from the land of forthcoming books is that I have a pub date, Tuesday Sept 3rd, and a COVER, which is below! So it’s time to get excited, and time for me to plan some events and work on publicizing this book in the coming months! Today, I’m going to share my particular saga of how the book cover came to be, and next month (if all goes to plan), I’ll share about what I’m doing from a publicity POV on my end.

I’ll start by saying that every publication journey is different, and every cover collaboration is different, too. I’ve had friends and colleagues who had plenty of cover input, no cover input whatsoever, and folks who struggled with whether or not to protest or exercise their veto power or right of refusal. I will say that this can be an overlooked part of book contracts — both my agent and I were adamant about negotiating for cover consultation in the book contract, and my editor Ashley promised that at Rowman & Littlefield, authors can be highly involved in the cover collaboration.

So we started from a place of knowing that I'd be having a conversation with the editors about the cover, before they involved the graphics team. But this is particular to an independent publisher; in big publishing houses (including the Big 5, from what I gather), the production team does all of the cover design, and may potentially only involve the author at a later date. I think it depends a lot on a particular press’s process!

One thing that helped me think about what I wanted for a cover was to look at amazing book covers from the past 5-10 years, and think about color palettes, symbolism, and just graphically strong covers.

Don’t laugh at me, but I made a PowerPoint presentation (kind of a mood board in slides) of covers that I found aspirational and effective, since I wanted to be able to show anyone who asked me what I was looking for in a cover. Okay, you can laugh! (I’ve been dreaming of this book having a cover for a long time.) I was especially interested in covers with a green color scheme (there are Taiwanese independence connotations there) or a moody blue-green teal feel, just because that was a vibe I connected to.

Here were some of my favorite cover images from recently published (or re-issued) books:

From there, I also decided that I wanted to share some scenic street scenes, temples, landscapes, or historic architecture from Taiwan with my editors, so I added these images to the slideshow:

And THEN, on a whim, I added the picture of the Liao ancestral home in Silai (which appears in the manuscript of the book, albeit in black and white), and which holds a ton of thematic significance, since the house was destroyed, and recovering this photo was the work of some arduous searching:

Happily, when we discussed the cover and all of these ideas, Ashley loved the idea of putting the Liao ancestral home on the cover — in color! My feeling was that I wanted it to be moody and melancholy and mysterious, sort of like All the Light We Cannot See or The Master, so I asked that those vibes be conveyed to the graphic designer.

And here’s what they came up with……

… drumroll please…

…

Ta Da!

I hope you like it! I love it, and am so so so excited to share this book with others. So I’ll post a pre-order link soon, and will give more details about events in the fall and publicizing this book in “the media.” Le grand sigh. There’s more work to do before we sleep. But it’s fun work! And so exciting to have a cover.

It makes the whole getting a book published thing feel much more real.

Thanks for letting me share, and I hope that your writing and creative projects and fun and self-actualizing vibes are all manifesting delights. Every day is a new opportunity to create one small, beautiful thing.

Here it is, your moment of Zen: