The paperback version of Tajja Isen’s thoughtful and funny Some of My Best Friends will hit shelves on February 27 with a new subtitle – And Other White Lies I’ve Been Told – and a brand new cover design.
Landing the perfect cover can be a daunting task and Debutiful caught up with the former editor-in-chief for Catapult magazine to see how the process unfolded when preparing for the paperback launch of Some of My Best Friends.
What was the process like from your end figuring out the design? Did you have any ideas you shared with the artists to lead them in any direction?
Figuring out the initial design for the hardcover was a dreamy process; easy and frictionless, I later realized, to an unusual degree. I sent a series of disconnected ideas to my publisher; things like my adoration for big, punchy serif fonts (with comps like Joan Didion and Eve Babitz), concrete objects used in unexpected ways (like The Idiot or Lucia Berlin’s story collections) and bold, surprising colors (like Trick Mirror). I had one hard limit: I didn’t want any faces or bodies, which get put on books by writers of color—especially when the book engages with social questions—in ways that can feel like lazy shorthand. I say these ideas were disconnected but I suppose they weren’t, exactly; there was a subliminal throughline, and it was—as Rose famously tells Jack in Titanic—“Market me like one of your white girls.”
And it worked! The designer incorporated all those things into this striking, classic-feeling piece of art. When I say no notes I’m being literal. But when we discussed the paperback redesign, consensus was that the original, albeit stunning, didn’t convey the book’s contents as clearly as it should. Text-based covers can be hard, especially for a debut, and the leaf lips, while iconic, are a little enigmatic. Which is also what I liked about them! But enigmatic can be anathema to marketability. Maybe if the cover of The Idiot wasn’t a rock but a drawing of Selin with an arrow pointing to her head and the words this girl is an idiot, it would have had triple the sales—we’ll never know. In any case, we had to go back to the drawing board.
What was it like trying to find an updated design for the paperback release?
The publication journey is littered with logic puzzles of self-advocacy you can take or leave as you please, but this was one I had to face. We had just cleared the hurdle of devising a peppier subtitle—Essays on Lip Service became And Other White Lies I’ve Been Told—when the question of putting a body on the cover resurfaced. My feelings hadn’t changed; others’ had. I wanted to honor my publisher’s desire for a cover that told a story, but I was hopeful we could do so without resorting to visual clichés of diversity or multiculturalism.
What made it all stickier is that the book is explicitly about reductive characterizations of race; how the work of racialized creators gets mangled by a market determined to satiate the prurient hunger of white consumers. I strongly believed that a cover image of, say, a group of variously shaded Black and brown people would give the wrong idea of what the book is about, which is institutional hypocrisy. I had written a whole book critiquing facile diversity gestures; I couldn’t live with myself if I put one on the cover. Trying to explain all of this was very meta. But it was also essential. It was existentially important to convey my ethical conviction that writers of color are consistently, fundamentally failed by the industry’s conflation of mainstream legibility with racial caricature. All this while not overtaxing the designer or the press, who understandably have fewer resources for paperbacks.
To that end, I tried to be flexible and more specific in my suggestions. My resistance, I said, was not to bodies per se, just bodies that communicated the rhetorical equivalent of a Benetton ad. People of color exist is (I guess) a story to some people. But you know who also has bodies? White people! In keeping with the white lies of the new subtitle, I suggested, maybe we could have a white person crossing their fingers behind their back. Like they’re lying. And they, the liar, are white. Like the lie. If literal is the goal, then I see your six brown bodies and I raise you one white hand. And, lo: a version of that idea made it onto the final cover.
What does the cover convey about the contents of the book?
The cover is framed as a text message conversation. It conveys the sense of easy speech that the book is about; how it’s easier than ever to affirm support for a social cause without actually doing anything to back it up, and how that can happen in our most casual, intimate spaces—like the group chat—as much as in formal and institutional ones, like publishing. I love that the title, Some of My Best Friends, is now presented to the reader in a speech bubble; a reminder that even though it’s become a punchline, it’s still a real thing people say. My concept of the white person’s crossed fingers modulated, in the group-chat context, to an emoji; a smart edit on the designer’s part. The emoji looks a little racially ambiguous onscreen, but I assure you it’s meant to be white (see above). I considered querying the ambiguity of the skin tone but decided to be judicious about my nitpicks.
I love the new font, too; I thought I was a serif girlie for life, but this has convinced me of the freshness of a razor-sharp line. There’s something interestingly masculine about the design, both the colors (including the white background) and the font, which looks like a cleaner version of the one on Seth Rogen’s Yearbook (a cover that features pink and beige and green people, but no brown ones). We didn’t talk about the comps in gendered terms, but the other final option was much more femme—blazing hot pink, fashion-mag lettering, sexy lipsticked (deracinated) mouth. I liked that one too, but this one’s better. With the stark palette and the emojis the design as a whole reminds me, if not literally then at least in general vibe, of Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days, a spiritual and ideological kinship that pleases me. Overall, I think it feels fun and contemporary, which is also how I want the book to feel. The colors and the font say “serious nonfiction” but that impression is nicely softened by the first-person subtitle and the playful text bubbles. Maybe my goal all along should have been “Market me like one of your white boys.”