DO JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Writing a book is a major achievement.  Ask anyone who has ever kissed their manuscript as they mailed it to their editor, or fist pumped right before they pressed “send.”

 

But the writing is just the beginning. With the traditional publishing industry undergoing liposuction in every way, the marketing, the talking it up, the endorsing, and the window dressing are even more critical.  That makes the cover (always an important factor in selecting your next read) of critical importance. 

 

Choosing a cover feels a bit like deciding what outfit to be buried in.  It’s an eternal, fairly final choice. Unless of course you write “The Help “ and you get a do-over on the paperback cover, swapping out the mysteriously ambiguous ravens for a picture of the movie stars.

 

So when choosing the cover do you go bold?  Or do you stick with the little black dress?  Do you tantalize or reveal?  If your book touches on a serious subject do you make the cover more…airy?  Do you merely hint at a suggestion of real life sadness?  Flap copy is designed to preview the contents of the book, but let’s be honest, don’t we all judge a book by its cover?  Aren’t we quick to flick our eyes over what appeals and then pick it up for closer inspection?

 

This is the era of Facebook and Match.com.   We can go right to the visual and decide if we want to fondle the goods or click on by.  The cover of a book is the eye candy for the IQ inside.  It’s the hooked worm on the bobber.

 

And the cover is where the author (unless they wield major New York Times Book Review list-rattling power) is merely one voice in a chorus of marketing experts. 

 

With my first two books, “In an Instant” and “Perfectly Imperfect,” this process was largely out of my hands.  My photograph appears on each of the covers, something that still makes me slightly uncomfortable.  It’s like the wealthy WASP homes I visited as a child where the ubiquitous oil portrait of “mother” in white dress and garden background lurked over the mantle.  You will never find a picture of me over my fireplace.  Not even if I was the Queen of England.  I’m not judging here, I’m just…inwardly cringing at the thought.

I framed a black and white photo of myself that was taken with one of the last giant portrait Polaroid cameras left in the world.  It was shot by iconic photographer Mary Ellen Mark and I am most proud of this picture because it was an award I got for being a mother first and an advocate second.  You can bet your sweet bippy that professional make up artists and stylists helped curate the illusion of a better me. But I will tell you that this picture hangs in my closet.  I’m frankly about the only person who gets to see it besides my husband.

In that photograph I’m fierce and strong, a warrior mother, my arms are on my hips like Linda Carter and I’m ready to Wonder Woman a lobbed spear right back at the bad guys.  But on the cover of my first book I’m in a bowel movement brown sweater looking… terribly sad.

“In an Instant” was an honest book about our family’s journey and recovery after my husband’s injury in Iraq.  It’s also a love story of sorts. So the cover had to say—“hey, remember the anchor guy on TV who got hit by a bomb, along with his devoted and egregiously sad wife?  The story lies within these pages… come get the poop.”  And then the color of the sweater kind of underscored the poop part for folks if they managed to mistake my winsome expression. 

My second book, “Perfectly Imperfect,” is a book of essays about life, some funny while others are more poignant.  I had hoped to have one lone, single inanimate object on the cover, like the jar of cream on Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”   I loved that cover.  My husband gave me a hideous turquoise ring once and I wrote about it in one of the chapters. I fancied that ring in its heart shaped fuzzy red box on the cover of the book like a whimsical smirk.  But since I am NOT Nora Ephron and people DON’T instantly recognize my name, it was decided that I myself would appear on the cover, (marketing calls this branding) bright colors and plaid sneakers and all.  

The “Perfectly Imperfect” cover showed readers that I’d regained my sense of humor, cheered up and had bought more fashionable clothing than that of my previous fecal-brown V-neck sweater-wearing phase. The carefree yet scrunched expression on my face, a kind of “what the hey” look, was meant to invite readers to sit a spell.  Looking at myself, forever preserved on the cover like a fly in amber, I am reminded of the need for more roughage in my diet, or perhaps a Metamucil colonic.

For “Those We Love Most,” a work of fiction, the sky was the limit in terms of cover choice.  Smarter marketing minds at my publisher Hyperion Voice would need to put their heads together. 

“It can’t look sad” was what I heard.  And the first cover concept was an Adirondack chair on a porch with flowers and sunlight.  It looked mystical, hopeful and partially spiritual, like someone was going to slide down Jacob’s ladder from heaven and show back up at the dinner table.  But it just didn’t feel right. Not to mention there wasn’t actually one porch in the book. 

What about a mere suggestion that something is amiss?  I asked.  But the rougher stuff, the loss had to be nuanced a bit—you don’t want to scare anyone off.  We are just throttling out of an economic recession and people want to escape into bondage, Hermes scarves, S & M and futuristic worlds.  If you believe the research, that is. 

Another version of the present cover had pink flowers that seemed to originate in Hawaii, despite the fact that the book takes place in the Midwest.   It reminded me of some of the 70’s feminine hygiene boxes—before they invented the wing technology and got all graphic and real-world on the outside.   But this newer book cover had legs.  We were refining and changing.

In the end we got a cover that feels inviting and homey, like I hope my house feels.  In fact the eerie thing is that without ever having seen my home, the artist captured my mudroom almost exactly.  I figured that was some kind of sign.

So here it is.  The cover.  I hope it speaks to you too.  I hope that when you and others are walking through a book store or airport or scrolling through a website or blog you hear a little… “You hooooo… over here” from my book.  And I hope you will be compelled to pick it up.

BIRTHING A BOOK – THOSE WE LOVE MOST

The book-as-baby analogy, birth as a metaphor for publishing a novel, is just a little too pat.  Some talented folks who write diligently each day can conceive of and pop out a book annually.  And when I grow up, I aspire to do that too, to write for three hours a day, every day.  But that doesn’t seem possible right now.  I wear too many hats, and the truth is I enjoy it.  I’m not good at saying no or making the outside world go away.

Me?  The author?  I’m more the elephant model of gestation.  Elephants take 22 months to give birth. The alpine salamander has a three-year pregnancy and the frilled shark is 3.5 years.  That was certainly more akin to my style in creating this first novel.  The goal is to get a little faster.

On September 11^th, “Those We Love Most” will come out.  This process, about as long as the Spiny Dog Fish takes to reproduce, has been roughly three years in the making.

Over the past few months I’ve been toying with how to describe my book in a few sentences.  Here is what I have so far…… “Those We Love Most” is about generations in a family, the seasons of a marriage, and whether or not a relationship can survive secrets.  It deals with how one moment of inattention can result in paying the ultimate price.  In the story, as so often in life, everyone is both right and wrong.  What endures is faith in the people we love despite their loyalties or betrayals.  Ultimately it is a love story, love of family, spouse, lover, friend and even stranger.  And it’s about forgiveness and resilience, the getting through it.  Most all of us can relate in some form.

Recently, I read about a survey that claimed during these tipsy economic times, people want to read stories about fantasy, happy endings and sex.  And I understand the “take me away Calgon” effect of imagining yourself bound and gagged with silk Hermes scarves.  I get that escaping into a fight-to–the-death nihilistic futuristic world might remove us from the reality of the mortgage, the potential for job loss, the stale marriage or life’s paper cuts of disappointment.  But I tend to be drawn to stories about real life and the complexities of human emotions.  I enjoy reading all kinds of genres but I love discovering a book that details how we move through and overcome the hard things life can throw at us to find lessons and community and resuscitation.

It’s these stories that connect us as human beings.  They are the ones that make us say “ahh, me too” or “if they can do it so can I” or even  “look how much worse I could have had it.”

I love the fiction of Anna Quindlen, Sue Miller, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Ann Hood or Sue Monk Kidd with their searing autopsies of interior lives.  The authentic dialogue of Adriana Trigiani's generational characters brings them to life.  I hated coming to the end of “Little Bee” and “The Namesake,” nodded my head with Annie Lamott’s honest memoirs and marveled at Ann Patchett's prose and intricately woven tales.  The characters in the fiction of Lionel Shriver, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen stayed with me for days.

“Those We Love Most” grew out of a real-life experience.  I was out of town and a friend called me in a panic.  I can still picture that hotel room I was in all these years later.  A seventeen-year-old driver in her town had struck a child, and she wanted to know if I would talk to the parents and provide some hope based on my own family’s experiences.  After I hung up, I kept thinking about that one pivotal “in-an-instant” moment and all the lives that had been affected by a split-second action.  That call formed the basis for a fictional story about how one pebble dropped in a pond ripples out in many directions.

The intricacies within families—the secrets people hold, the love that ebbs and flows in marriages and relationships, and the bond between a parent and child—are themes all of us can relate to.  The business of living is chock-full of so many extremes, and while there are parts of my book that deal with sadness, real life is defined by a bubbling stew of love and loss, joy and sorrow, betrayal, triumph, and achievement. 

I wanted to examine the process of life coming unglued and then look at all the strengths and the wonderful qualities that lie within us to do the right thing for the ones we love most.

There are a few months before I give birth.  I’m getting the nest ready, booking engagements for the fall and preparing to usher this new project onto the stage.  I hope like hell people want to read it.  And I look forward to sharing it with you.  I hope I have the opportunity to cross paths with you on this birthing journey in one manner or another.    

Stay posted for the next installment about "Those We Love Most."  I'll be dishing about the cover selection process and how it feels a little like picking the outfit you will be buried in.

SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED...

....And this fall....it's yours! 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE 

I did it.  Ta-daa!  My first novel, “Those We Love Most” will be out September 11, 2012.  It’s my wedding anniversary, among other important milestones.

And as I put the edited manuscript in a big padded envelope and filled out the UPS label (too scary to trust to regular mail) I thought I’d feel a total kick-up-my-heels sense of joy.  A kind of Sound of Music, bodice-heaving, running over the hills with glee kind of approach.  It wasn’t exactly like that. 

Don’t get me wrong.  Finishing a book is a big old dealy-bop.  Stapling that envelope shut is the culmination of a lot of hours, creation, frustration, editing, re-writes, self–doubt, deleting and erasure chewing, although frankly few writers I know still use erasers.

 

I’ve always been a sporadic writer.  My huckleberry pie life is cut up into lots of different slices, drawn and quartered on any given day; mom, wife, journalist, writer, advocate for injured service members, public speaker.  I’m a daughter as well and right now that involves a measure of caretaking and coordinating as my parents fail and falter in different degrees and disparate ways.  And somewhere in there I’m a girl friend too.  And I’ve always valued my female friendships, even as we all lamented how much work and family often came between more than a few plans to do lunch or grab a drink.  So many of my posse have been just as absorbed in the rat-a-tat-tat of the child rearing years as I have been. We are only now, most of us, poking our heads out of the foxhole and blinking in the coming dawn of the empty nest.

 

But I digress.  This is about my book.  The book I always wanted to write and the writing process.  Oh geez, you say.  Boring.  The writing process?  ZZZZZZZZZ.  I’m going to delete.   And you may.  But for any of you who have struggled to realize a dream or long held the notion that there is a finite time line for what you want to accomplish, hang on a tick.  Stay with me.   I am here to say that anything, really, is possible. But this is also about realizing dreams.  It’s about second acts.  And if you want it badly enough, you WILL find a way to get it done. Whether it’s getting your pilot’s license or doing your first stand-up gig or composing a song.  I’m living proof.  And I’m certifiably over 50.  Fabulous freaking fifty.

The truth is I stopped and started this novel a number of different times.  There were points I didn’t believe in my ability to weave a tale that any of you would want to read.  This is a round-about way of telling you that at one point I thought the book sucked.  But then all of a sudden it didn’t.  Last summer I found myself with a stretch of time and I got busy.  Instead of writing in the corners of my life, on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and occasional early weekend mornings, I got a little serious.  I wrote whatever was coming out, and out it poured, rushing head-long into a decent story, with characters I’d come to care about.

 

(the desk where I love to write..)

And while the result still required some shaping and pruning, my friends at Hyperion publishing saw the possibilities.  And so we shaped, we pruned.  And we clipped a little more.  One whole characters voice was scalpeled out.  This is where you trust your editor like a lover.  This is where you become partners and go to couples counseling.  

 

But turning in the manuscript was only the beginning.  The galleys will be out soon and they will go into the hands of illustrious book reviewers and journalists, other writers and bookstore influencers, bloggers and indie owners and the people who place the advance orders.  This will feel a bit like my pre-pubescent self standing naked in front of the mirror after middle school school gym class.  I will be a harsh chronicler of all my flaws.  Art is, after all, a subjective thing. 

 

But then the real work begins.  The marketing and the talking it up, the book selling and the chatting. There will be tweeting and blogging, the readings and signings.  I am an author who kind of likes being out on the road.  I really do mean it when I say it’s the people.  But then again I’m still a relative virgin on book number three, the accomplished and prolific ones will tell me.   

 

Will readers turn out to hear my fiction the way they turned out for the first and second non-fiction books to hear about our family’s journey through injury and then recovery?  “In an Instant” was a bird’s eye view of the bleached bones of a disaster and a marriage.  Everyone slows down on the highway to eyeball a roadside wreck.  But will they care as much about this fictional family I have created and blown life into? I hope so.

 

Writing a book for me was a lot like giving birth to a baby after 40.  In fact, in some ways it’s much harder. First you mess around a little, hunt and peck and see what you’ve got.   And then when the stick hasn’t turned blue, when nothing much is happening on the pages, you get serious.  You come up with a plan.

 

Suddenly the writing process needs to be plodding and methodical, a bit like taking temperatures for ovulation and shot for hormones and doctor’s appointments and monitoring and… well, you get the drift. Writing a book is a lot like that.  But there are moments of unbridled joy.  You can feel it occasionally when the story is coming, when a line or a paragraph sings out to you like the buzz of a zip line.  Every writer has experienced those tracts of time, those beloved fugue states, so much better than a chemical high.  If only we truly knew how to conjure them up on demand.

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

 

Indulge me the tired old “giving birth” analogy as a writer.  I’ve finished a damn book.  I’m elated and cautious all at the same time.  And as I move past the moment without celebration, without popping the sparkling apple juice at the dinner table or crowing too loudly on Facebook or tweeting, (OK, I posted it once) I am conscious the whole time that this process is a marathon, not a sprint.

 

I am still struck by something the writer Anthony Horowitz told me.  He is the officially sanctioned British author for all future Sherlock Holmes novels and the beloved Alex Ryder series for kids.  When I asked him what he did to celebrate completing a book he answered, “I take one full day off before I begin the next.” 

 

And so forgive me, dear reader, if I return to the next book, which is already tugging at my sleeve.  I hope to meet you in the fall on the road, in a book store, at a forum or library or Skyping into your book group from my cramped home office.  I thank you for reading and caring, for wanting to hold books in your hands or devour them digitally on a tablet.  I hope you always have an appetite for stories. Stories, after all, are the things that connect us.

 

“Those We Love Most “ – published By Voice – on sale September 11, 2012