Every time I felt myself reaching for the phone to call my editor to discuss my cover, I thought about that writer I had met all those years ago, remembering how involved he had been in the process and how the process had driven him mad. In my case, the thought of relinquishing such control went against everything I believed in, yet I refused to give in to it. They will excavate and forage and root around in the novel’s mud and come up with something more inspiring than even you could have imagined. If you’re lucky, as I was, you will have a team of designers who see something in your book that even you didn’t know was there. It can come close, but let’s face it, it’s a different beast altogether and is best left to the experts-the art department. Just as a movie adapted from a novel can never truly reflect the complexity and emotion that resonates on the page, so too a cover can never truly reflect the novel within. I wanted to have as much input as possible, because, well, it was my book, after all, and I knew it better than anyone, right? I wanted it to make some noise, to drown out the other novels around it. I wanted it to whet a reader’s curiosity. I wanted mine to reflect the novel I wrote, and to be bold, imaginative, and attention-grabbing. “But if you had to choose one,” he asked, “which one would it be?”Īll writers-and I am no exception-have fairly strong ideas about the design of their covers. I saw each iteration of his cover, which arrived by FedEx every couple of days.

Mostly, though, he talked about his novel’s cover, which he never went anywhere without, as if it were some kind of talisman. Every night at dinner, he sat down beside me and told me how many pages he’d rewritten that day, how his editorial process was going, and how much buzz he was already getting. Many years ago, while a guest at a writing colony, I met an excitable writer who was worried about his debut novel.

A beautiful oops