I’m often asked: what helps a debut crack through the piles of books that land at Debutiful HQ? One answer, as silly as it may seem, is a good book cover. A great book cover. A fabulous book cover.
I love well-designed book covers (and love doing cover reveals). When I saw Victoria Hulbert’s cover reveal in PEOPLE for her debut Screen Memory (out March 9, 2027 with a design from Vivian Lopez Rowe), I needed to know more about it. So we chatted via email just to learn about what the process was like on the author end.
I heard you were heavily involved in the cover process. What did the path to getting your cover look like?
I know every author’s experience with the making of their cover varies, especially first-time authors, so I wasn’t sure how much input I would get, but I was pleasantly surprised at how involved I got to be in the process. There was a photograph by Pete Martich that I had been imagining on the cover for years; I’d saved it to my desktop after we published a portfolio of his work in No Tokens, and I would look at it often while drafting. I was excited when both my editor and the art team agreed it would make for a great cover, but unfortunately, we learned we couldn’t license the photo.
In place of that, I sent along a few photographs by Kourtney Roy, whose surreal images I’d recently grown kind of obsessed with, and we all agreed on the one that ultimately made it on the cover. I love how it subtly gestures at so many of the things the novel is about — feminine spectacle, “blank” memory, the desert landscape — and I love the way Roy’s photographs, which are highly staged, speak to the performativity of reality.
Once we’d decided on the image, there were quite a few rounds of back and forth when it came to font treatment. I was probably a bit annoying with how nitpicky I was (“Can you move my name just slightly to the right?” that kind of thing) but everyone was very patient with me.
I especially love photographs as book covers. Before finding Martich and then Roy photographs that worked for your book, did you always want photography? Does it say something to the contents of the book? Or did it fall into place that way?
Well it’s funny because I always thought I had very strong opinions on book covers (I mean, I do…), but when my editor asked for my preferences (i.e. photographic, illustrative, text-forward), I was kind of at a loss! I couldn’t name exactly what I liked and didn’t like. So I literally went to a Barnes and Noble at the mall (it was the only bookstore near where I was living in the desert), and I took pictures of all the covers I liked best. It was then that I could see the ones I felt most drawn to usually had a photograph on the front. Covers like Perfection by Vicenzo Latronico or Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu. One of my favorite covers of the year is Krista Diamond’s Close Relationships with Strangers.
I’m sure there would have been interesting ways this cover could have utilized graphics or illustration or other artwork, but the world of Screen Memory is so heavily invested in images, and the power and perspective of the camera, that it felt key for the cover to showcase that.
Once you landed on the photography, you mentioned: “there were quite a few rounds of back and forth when it came to font treatment.” Talk to me about fonts. Was it the vibe? The placement? What were you saying vs the team?
I love a fun font. Think Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy or Sarvat Hasin’s Strange Girls or Claire Vaye Watkins’s forthcoming Yellow Pine. But through my back and forth with the art team I learned that if you pair a striking photograph with an equally striking font, it might take something away from what the photo could do on its own (I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to the rule!) So we settled on a standard sans serif font.
I was pretty particular when it came to placement of the text. And color too. I asked to see the title in red, yellow, orange, pink — both with the glow effect and without the glow effect…I’m not kidding…I wish I wasn’t this way.
When it came to placement, we wanted to avoid the obvious, which would be to put the title somehow on the billboard itself. Especially since the blankness of the billboard speaks so acutely to the novel’s themes. We tried a couple different iterations before agreeing that the vertical title was the most visually interesting.
What is the relationship like with the art team? Is it emails? Video calls? Do you sic your agent on them if things aren’t working out?
So we worked exclusively over email with my editor as the mediator. Basically she would send me the new mockups from the art team and I would respond with feedback, which she would relay to them. My agent and I would usually hop on a call after we received each new round of covers—I felt like I could be a little more blunt with her about what I didn’t like and she would help me phrase it in a way that would actually be constructive for the designer. It definitely was a team effort in that regard.
What do you wish you knew before the process? Aka what do you want debut authors to know about the cover design process?
One thing I wish I knew—and this might just be hyper specific to my situation—is that even after you’ve settled on a cover, you might find out that the photo or artwork can’t be licensed for one reason or another. So it helps to hold things loosely, to not get too attached to one cover, and to trust that something even better might come along once you’ve gone back to the drawing board.