(Scribner, 2013) I am fortunate in that one of my colleagues here at GQ is the unbelievably talented Chelsea Cardinal. She had read a draft of my book in the very early stages, years before I even had a publisher. She loved it and enthusiastically told me she’d like to work on the cover when the manuscript sold. When Scribner and Nan Graham bought the book, I asked Nan if she would consider going out of house for the jacket design, and […]

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(Little, Brown and Company, 2012) When I first started talking book covers with my editor, Judy Clain, I only had a few stipulations: No script, no embossed title, and no pale pink. I think I was having nightmarish visions of the books I’d seen in my youth on the racks at the drugstore—all ripping bodices and women clinging to a swashbuckler’s muscular leg. Yes: the idea of book covers can cause some pretty extreme and unreasonable paranoia. Of course, my […]

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(The Penguin Press, 2013) Shortly after I sold my manuscript to the brilliant Andrea Walker at the Penguin Press, she asked me what sort of book covers I liked and whether I had any thoughts about the cover of my own book. I’m not an art director, but I told her that one of the book’s central images might inspire the designers. In the first chapter, the narrator, Sarah Zuckerman, describes watching home movies with her parents, and when the […]

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(W.W. Norton & Co., 2013) As soon as I sold the memoir of my father to Norton, I knew what picture I wanted on the cover. This photograph of my dad and I, taken in front of a pair of marble arches in Golden Gate Park, has long been my favorite of us. I was ten years old when he took me out of school for the day to pose for a series of pictures he’d hoped would be the […]

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(Grand Central Publishing, 2012) I’ve had my ups and downs with my book covers in the past. Mostly downs, to be frank. I heard another author joking recently about how grateful she was that her book cover wasn’t some girl running through a field of wheat, and I was like, wait, that was actually my last book cover. I’m the joke! Ha, ha, ha. Hilarious.    But still, I had high hopes for The Middlesteins. I was with a new […]

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(Graywolf Press, 2013) When I’m on the subway and I see someone at the end of the car reading a novel; when I want to know what that novel is but can’t make out the author name or title; when all the foregoing and yet I still know what that person is reading—that is my idea of a great cover. Which is to say: for Woke Up Lonely, I wanted something bold. Something that felt designed. No photographs. No birds. […]

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(Penguin, 2013) Being an artist and a writer, I had a specific vision for the cover of Glow: stark, strong, and allegorical, with a dash of mysticism, enticing readers to flip open the flaps and discover the mysteries held inside. Glow is a multi-generational family saga that takes place in a small town in the American South over the course of one hundred years. The main characters’ narratives spring back to a fictional progenitor, the great Solomon Bounds, pioneer and […]

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(Hyperion/Voice, 2012) No matter what cover I’m given, there will always be an initial period of panic because whatever my designers come up with will (of course!) not match the image I held in my mind for years and years. For Arcadia, I’d decided the cover would be an updated version of the frontispiece of Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia: woodcut-like, but with a brick Arcadia House in the center and maybe a caravan in the place of the boat. I loved […]

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