Good People, the debut novel by Kat Lewis, is a sharp, darkly funny debut about race, identity, ambition, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Raised by a Black family after being abandoned as a baby, Jo Tope—a white woman obsessed with achievement and belonging—believes success will unlock the life she was meant to have. But as her pursuit of a Rhodes Scholarship collides with alcoholism, privilege, and uncomfortable truths about herself, Jo is forced to confront what it really means to be a good person.
Good People will be published on April 27, 2027, by Simon & Schuster and is available for preorder now.
Lewis is a video game writer and professional Dungeons & Dragons game master who holds degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and the University of South Florida.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Good People, designed by Madelyn Rodriguez, along with a Q&A with Lewis about its creation.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Good People follows the story of Jo Tope, a white girl who was raised by a Black family and must come to terms with her identity as she applies for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.
The novel is ultimately a satire about race, class, and elite academia. While writing this book, I drew on my experience as a Black woman who grew up in a predominantly white community in rural North Carolina. Growing up, I had to learn how to navigate spaces in which my community often saw me as “other.” When your community views you as “other,” you often have to navigate microaggressions like people touching your hair without asking or demanding to know where you are “really from.” Along with this, you often have to become hypervigilant about self-advocacy and proving your “worth” within the community. “You have to work twice as hard for half of what the majority has.” This is a phrase that many marginalized people have heard at some point in their lives.
With these experiences informing the book, our team wanted to create a cover that gives a nod to the challenge of “otherness” while representing a connection between Jo’s two cultural identities.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
It took me nine years to write and sell Good People. During those nine years, I was calling the novel Lit by Burning. This working title came from a line that is still in the book: “. . . was her future only bright because it was lit by burning bridges?” I’m not a visual artist, so I didn’t put too much thought into what the cover might look like, but given the context of the working title, I envisioned a cover with a burning bridge.
After my editor acquired the book, we talked about the title, and he had this great idea to shift the title’s focus from Jo’s struggle to the things that help Jo survive her own life. Much of the novel is about young people coming of age and the self-destruction that’s required to become yourself. Despite the bridges that we may burn on our ways to becoming ourselves, it’s the good people in our lives that make the journey worthwhile. And that’s what we wanted to capture with the title change.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Since the book was acquired in 2024, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Good People’s “ideal reader” and the media that reader is already consuming. When it was time to start the cover process, the team asked me to share a few words on who I thought Good People’s ideal reader was. Here’s what I sent them:
Good People’s ideal reader is a millennial Black woman who is chronically online,
watched Game of Thrones, and went through an anime phase. Though the novel is
literary fiction, its unhinged protagonist will appeal to Black women who watched
WandaVision and said, “Good for her” like Lucille Bluth. In addition to this ideal reader,
Good People will also resonate with people of color who navigate predominantly
white spaces and anyone else who feels “othered” in their own community.
Beyond these particular demographics, this book is for nerdy readers and comedy
enthusiasts who have Dropout TV subscriptions, listen to Dungeons and Dragons
podcasts, and love movies and TV shows like Poker Face, Thor Ragnarok, American
Fiction, and Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Along with this description, I shared six covers that I thought were already appealing to this audience, six covers that I thought had phenomenal design, and six memes that were tonal comps for the story.
The team hit it out of the park with the first version they sent me. We only played around with font options and the nail polish color before settling on the final version.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Two months after I shared my cover comps and meme board, my editor called me, saying that he received the cover and wanted to hear my reaction live. While we were on the phone, he emailed the cover to me, and the six seconds I waited for it to pop up in my inbox were the longest six seconds of my life. I started writing Good People in 2015. By the time the book hits the shelves next year, I will have spent twelve years working to bring these characters into the world. For over a decade, Good People has been nothing but a very long Word Document on my computer. Seeing Jo’s hair on the cover made the novel truly feel like a “real” book for the first time.