Anna Kovatcheva’s debut novel, She Made Herself a Monster, will be published by Mariner Books on February 10, 2026. The novel is available for pre-order.
Kovatcheva was born in Bulgaria and received her MFA in fiction from New York University. She Made Herself a Monster was completed while she was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and her short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of She Made Herself a Monster, designed by Paul Miele-Herndon, alongside a Q&A with Kovatcheva about crafting her haunting debut and the eerie allure of nineteenth-century Bulgaria.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I work professionally as a graphic designer, so it may be surprising to hear that for most of the writing process, I really didn’t have any idea.
It wasn’t until I was wrapping up the querying draft that I started really thinking about the cover. This painting, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, emerged as a possible contender during that time—but even then, it was only a vague notion.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team? What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
My first step was to warn everyone involved that unfortunately, this was a subject about which I could not possibly be relaxed or normal.
I still didn’t have a firm idea of what I wanted, so I took a field trip to a local bookstore to look at a bunch of recent books in their natural habitat. I chatted with some helpful booksellers, took many photos of beautiful covers, and then sat down and made a slide deck of different creative approaches I could see working well, annotating what I specifically liked and didn’t. My goal was to offer clear direction but to avoid being too prescriptive, which I hope I achieved. (My agent and editor assure me that my slideshow was helpful, rather than completely unhinged, which is very kind of them.)
My cover designer, Paul Miele-Herndon, absolutely knocked it out of the park. He delivered a few different early concepts, and quickly the team agreed that we were all most excited by the direction you see here.
Seeing the finished cover for the first time was a surreal, beautiful dream. I love love love how it all came together, and I’m so grateful to Paul for putting up with my antics. I love the art. I love the colors and the typography. My partner pointed out that the backwards slant of the serifs seems to trace the path of Judith’s arm holding the sword, which delights me. And of course, I love the blood spatter—this is a vampire book, after all, albeit an unconventional one. We had to get a bit of blood in there.
How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?
Anyone already familiar with this painting probably also knows the story behind it: when she was a teenager, Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by a colleague of her father’s. Later, when she painted this scene, she allegedly cast herself as Judith and her rapist as Holofernes. Art historians often point to how active Gentileschi’s Judith is—determined, putting her weight into it—compared to other Judiths of the time, who seem repelled by their task. The women of this book don’t shy away from gore either, strategically shedding blood to try and shape a better world for themselves.
To that end, I also love that Paul’s crop of the artwork keeps Judith’s maid in view, while reducing the man to a spray of blood and a grasping hand. At its heart, this is a book about women—women working together, often in bloody ways—so it makes perfect sense that there’s more than one woman on the cover.
Gentileschi’s painting predates the events of this novel by more than two hundred years. The ultimate crescendo of the book is quite different than her scene. And yet, the spirit of the book is the same. It’s about violence, gendered and otherwise. It’s about women in community. It’s about death and hope. During the design process, we talked about how readers who resonate with the painting and its story are absolutely the intended audience for this book—I hope that once they have the opportunity to read it, they’ll agree.