From Vibes To Cover

How the cover design process looks for trad pubbed authors

I meant to send this out at the weekend but … umm, I don’t really know what happened. I am deep in the editing well, far from daylight/my laptop and forgot about communicating with non-fictional beings!

So hello! Aside from editing, we are also in the very almost final stage of developing a cover for We Are All Ghosts In The Forest. Sadly I can’t share it with you yet - publishing secrets and pre-publication timelines are doing their thing, and I imagine we’ll reveal the cover around the point we start sending ARCs out (so, in Feb or March, with luck).

What I can do, is talk through the process of cover designing in trad pub and perhaps share some ideas for how you the author can best intersect with that to increase your chances of getting the cover of your dreams.

I’m not as visual as some, so when I have a finished book my sense of what I want the cover to look like is generally quite vague. For my first book, I could only say ‘I don’t want people’ and ‘Moody, maybe with foxes.’ Which is … well it’s better than nothing. But there are several hundred directions that premise could take and many of them wouldn’t have really fitted my inner vague sense of the book.

Incidentally, I got extremely lucky with my first book in that my publisher spotted a new piece of art by award winning cover artist Daniele Serra and knew instantly that it fitted the book perfect. So my vagueness didn’t shoot me in the foot and I adore my moody fox with no people cover!

Buying the rights to a pre-existing piece of art is a slightly unusual process though. In most cases a book cover is created specifically for the book according to a cover brief given to the artist.

By my second book, I’d figured out that I needed to think more clearly about what I wanted. Now, I look for covers of books that both fit in the same marketing space and have stylistic approaches I like. I look up the designers of covers I admire and check out their portfolios. I try to come up with a list of aims that are more than ‘make it dreamy?’. Such as - ‘I think a minimalist & slightly eerie foresty vibe would work really well’ (Ghosts) or ‘I’d love lush tropical colours, including animals that are motifs in the book, and reference to the sea’ (Mother Sea).

And so for all my subsequent books, I’ve gone to my editor with some comp covers, a set of specific vibes that I want to convey, and some stylistic or design elements I am keen to see.

This step can take the form of a conversation in a bookshop (my second book), some email back and forth about comparative covers and photographs (my third book), or me sharing Pinterest boards and comparative covers, and us both pulling together a list of potential artists (We Are All Ghosts In The Forest).