(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 the sly nod at copulation implied by the original, and thought it’d be both witty and beautiful. Alas, I have always offered my strong opinions to my editor, and my opinions have always been listened to in a polite manner, but they have always been ultimately ignored. I’m sure that’s for the best. I haven’t been trained in cover art, and cover designers do know what sells.

In truth, the first time I opened the PDF of Arcadia, I had a nervous breakdown. It was so BRIGHT. So, so HIPPIE. My book left the realm of hippiehood at the exact middle of the narrative, and I felt the 1970s music poster effect limited the scope of the book. My idea was to work against the lazy stereotypes of hippies that we are bashed over the heads with over and over again on television and in the movies, and it felt to me at first that I was given a stereotype of a cover, reinforcing the exact thing that makes me bridle so much.

The silhouettes, while a nice nod to the scherenschnitte cover for my first book, The Monsters of Templeton, felt a little clip-arty to me, as did the butterfly, which has some kind of significance that I still am not clear about. I tried to get them changed, but I was politely ignored. I tried to get the color palette changed to green and gold and blue, feeling that from afar the book looked like a puddle of melted sorbet; but again, was politely ignored. I wept and gnashed my teeth, to no avail. The book came out. And people tell me every single week that the cover is stunning and startling and so very beautiful.

By now, years after I first cried over my cover, I have come around to believe in the genius of my cover designer, to such an extent that I am now profoundly disappointed that the cover didn’t carry over to the paperback (which, alas, has a cover I don’t love as much). Now, the US hardback cover ties both of my beautiful UK covers (paperback and hardcover) as my favorites.

Even with the US paperback, though, to be a woman writer and not be given an insulting cover of a depersonalized woman—the back of a woman’s head, her feet, her headless body, her hands holding something sweet/disturbing—well, I chalk that up as a moral victory. (Onward!)

—Lauren Groff, author

Laura Klynstra, art director at Hyperion Books, contacted me about working on a new cover for her. Laura and I had previously worked together years before at HarperCollins, where she ran the Amistad imprint and the audio division. We had collaborated on numerous covers over the years, including her art directing me on this one:

For this new project, Laura wanted me to tackle Lauren Groff’s newest novel, Arcadia. Lauren’s previous novel was The Monsters of Templeton, and sported a silhouette-themed cover. I think due to my extensive work in silhouettes, Laura thought it might be a good pairing.

Arcadia is set in the ’70s and tells the tale of Bit, a small and sensitive boy who was born on a commune and knows nothing of the outside world. Bit eventually comes across a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and is immediately enthralled by it. He begins to envision himself as the sister in the Swan Brothers story. The story continues as we follow Bit’s life as he grows up and leaves the commune.

We knew initially that we wanted to try some comps with silhouettes to mimic Lauren’s previous novel, but Laura was also very interested in making sure that I try some designs with loud, bright, almost neon colors in order to reference some of those psychedelic posters of yesteryear. I had the goal to make it look “groovy.”

I tried a handful of designs.

One of my favorites was a symmetrical and vaguely mystical-looking silhouette design where Bit is front and center amongst swans and other animals—in some ways, a visualization of one child’s imagination.

In another, I tried for more of a literal adaption from her previous novel, where everyday life scenes on the farm were shown in a panel format (much like The Monsters of Templeton‘s vignettes), although I used a very bold-colored gradient in the background to make the cover look a bit more modern.

In what would become the base for the final cover, I designed an pseudo-Art Nouveau poster meets a ’60s/70′s rock poster (which is sort of one in the same, in many ways), complete with bending letterforms and a butterfly silhouette filled with flowers. I figured, What could possibly say hippie more than a butterfly made of flowers!

Initially, I presented two color options on this concept. A fluorescent yellow/green with copper foil, and an orange, magenta, and purple cover which we would end up going with. If I recall, the final cover ended up being a bit more red than magenta, due to some sales feedback, but nonetheless, the cover turned out quite nicely, and as always it was a pleasure to work with Laura Klynstra, who is by far one of the best human beings that I’ve met in publishing. Also, on a side note, she makes the world’s best sugar cookies. Like ever. I’m totally serious.

—Will Staehle, designer

(McSweeney’s, 2009)

Toward the end of editing God Says No, Eli [McSweeney's editor/designer Eli Horowitz] and I started talking about cover ideas. I sent him a slew of lurid images from a book called X-Rated: Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s, stuff with titles like Danish Pastries and Put Out or Shut Up, which seemed to irritate him, mostly because of the size of the images, which I think clogged his inbox.

So at a certain point he showed me the work of a couple of different illustrators, and we decided on Kevin Christy. I think Kevin had some disturbing and vaguely religious paintings in his portfolio that we found graphic/compelling and thought would be a good fit for the cover.

A while later Eli showed me Kevin’s sketch, based on Peter Paul Rubens’ The Elevation of the Cross. 

I was a little mystified, honestly—referencing such a high-art source seemed far too tasteful for the tacky southeastern atmosphere I’d meant to create in the book, which is about a closet-case GBM from South Carolina who cheats on his wife in public bathrooms, among other things. But in the interest of speeding the process I thought that the image could be tweaked to represent the book a lot better.

I don’t remember whose idea it was to move the crucifixion of the main character, Gary Gray, to a strip mall parking lot, but I continue to applaud that move. Mainly, I pushed for heightened tastelessness; I wanted a kind of Sgt. Pepper’s-style melange of the various oddball figures who appear in the book. I don’t remember if it was me who suggested that Jesus participate in the crucifixion, but the audacity of it still amuses me.

I thought people would be sort of appalled by the cover, actually—it’s fairly offensive if you actually grapple with the content of the image. But I never got any complaints, not even from booksellers.

Eli was doing this “short jacket” thing on all of the book jackets that year. The “Horowitz jacket,” we ended up calling it.

I forget the practical reason he gave for doing it, but I loved the interplay between title on the hardcover of the book and the paper/image of the jacket; like a lot of McSweeney’s fare, it calls attention to the status of the book as an artifact. Writers, probably more than any group, tend to think of books in physical, sensual terms. So in that regard, I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have a first book (a hardcover!) come out with a publisher that cares so much about making exquisite and distinctive (if occasionally tasteless) fetish objects.

—James Hannaham, author

I’m no good at actual graphic design and only decent at book design. My only real advantage is that I also edit the books I design, and so by the end of that year or two I’ve really got the novel in my bones. In the case of God Says No, James managed to pull off an impressive combo of high and low; amid all the Waffle House bathrooms and mundane humiliations, Gary Gray persists and even triumphs. It’s a heroic journey, beset by tribulations on all sides.

Meanwhile, I had recently been editing Lawrence Weschler’s terrific Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, which frequently joined iconic paintings with incongruous modern parallels, so I guess I had that on the brain, and somehow I seized upon the Rubens painting as a starting point. (A clever trick for compensating for my design weaknesses: steal from the 17th century!)

I’d worked with Kevin Christy before, and I knew he had both the classical drawing skills and a certain bright, fleshy style—a perfect fit for the project.

He and James did a lot to push my hazy high-concept mashup toward actual realization. James was deeply involved throughout, pushing us to go bigger, tackier, trashier. (One note from him reads, “Hey Eli. Can one of the figures hoisting Gary onto the cross be Mickey Mouse, dressed as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?” Another: “In an ideal world, the fire dancer would look a lot more like Mario Lopez.”)

I love the three-quarters jacket in general—it presents lots of fun design possibilities, but still any printer can manage it, with no added expense. It allows for the poppiness of CMYK printing, including necessary practicalities like barcode, blurbs, promo text, but also points towards the book’s long life after the moment of purchase, once all those things become irrelevant and the jacket eventually falls to pieces. I don’t know why people don’t use it more.

—Eli Horowitz, editor/designer

I came to the project through the art director at McSweeney’s, Eli. He had seen my work at a show in San Francisco and I had appeared in a few of their books in the past. He already had the concept in mind when he contacted me so really the experience was all about getting it to a place where the author hopefully liked it. (I don’t know if he did or not.)

It’s basically a spin on a Ruben’s painting adding contemporary characters that inhabited the book. My take on the book was that it was beautifully personal and I just wanted to lend whatever I could do to hopefully engage people into picking it up and reading it.

There were minor tweaks from James about the way people looked, etc., but nothing major, and the process with Eli is always pretty easy.

I sent the original to James and that was that. The local bookstore I go to in Los Angeles, Family, has a copy where you can see the cover on their shelf and I always like seeing it out there in public.

—Kevin Christy, artist

(Henry Holt and Co., 2013)

It has been ten years since my identical twin sister Cara and I posed in snow-covered New England, making the photographs that would become Kindred. The picture from the series that Cara called “Blizzard” was the only true portrait we made. It’s now the cover of Her.

There was a Nor’easter the afternoon we took it, and almost impossibly limited visibility. From the comfort of inside, Cara watched me struggle in her front yard to set up my 4×5 view camera. She put her hands against the windowpanes and felt their cold. I plunged my tripod into a snow bank, prayed it would stay put. There were so many problems to solve that day: motion blurs photographs. And Cara was still afraid to go outside.

Two Octobers before, in 2001, something truly terrible happened to Cara. That October, she was raped in the woods while she was out walking her dog. Cara had feared going outside since the early autumn attack, shutting herself in. I’d hoped that if we went outdoors together, Cara might be less afraid; so I selected the near New England landscape as our backdrop. I naively hoped that photography might help heal her, and for a time it did. Posing gave Cara power. The brutal cold and beautifully dramatic weather was our perfect mirror.

Cara refused to dress, so I made adjustments for the pictures that allowed for this. We wore identical long black wool coats our mother had given us for Christmas. Cara buttoned hers over her nightshirt and pants, painted red lipstick on her mouth, pinked her cheeks. I copied her makeup, became her duplicate. I had a vision: identicals in the snow. I used the doppelgänger in the literary Gothic sense: landscapes were to describe the psychological state of the characters of our novel. These landscapes became the medium for the telling of our fractured relationship. It was easier for me to think of us as fictitious characters than to grapple with the truth of our new reality. I wanted Poe’s warring sisters, forever lost, women written with hysterical vapor.

The day of our blizzard the wind blew the snow and ice so hard it flew sideways, stinging my cheeks. I took cover beneath the black drape I used to block out light, focusing the lens on the picture before me. I saw nothing but white, and the vague outline of naked tree branches. Flakes fell with such force, and so quickly that I’d have to make an exposure fast enough to beat them, freezing them in place. We’d have to be close enough to the lens to touch it.

I walked out from behind the camera and drew a line with my foot in the snow. That is where we stood. I set the camera’s timer and yelled out for Cara to join me. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder. The heat of our living bodies kept us warm as the timer wound down, whining as it went. I stared directly at the lens. Cara looked away and down at the line I’d made: The snow had already filled it in.

—Christa Parravani, author

Her was a great project for me to work on. The book is extremely moving and although I am a fraternal twin and can’t truly understand the bond identical twins share, Christa’s prose resonated with me.

It was clear to me how to proceed with a design; use photography of the twins. This was the easy part as it is rare to work on a book jacket where the author is also an accomplished artist. Christa’s photography is gorgeous and the images of herself with her twin sister are hauntingly so.

As a designer I was most concerned with not detracting from such a compelling image. For me, this design was my first choice but with every project a dozen or so are presented. I was very pleased my group agreed.

I kept the typography simple as if Christa was speaking directly to the viewer, juxtaposing a handwritten title above Cara with the authors name below her image. It is clear who is speaking to us and the sadness in Christa’s stare seems prescient, as if she senses the tragic future to come. The final jacket uses a soft-touch lamination that doesn’t alter color, which was important to me given the subtleties of the image. Moreover it has a wonderful velvety tactile quality which compels one to want to touch the book.

As a designer, I would have preferred the blurb to remain on the back jacket, but, alas, we are in the business to sell books.

—Rick Pracher, designer

(Knopf, 2012)

I couldn’t have been happier the first time I saw the cover image. It seemed like a perfect visual metaphor for my book, which is very psychological, very much concerned with the “interior weather” of the characters. You can see the landscape inside a snow globe, but you can’t get there, so the image connotes both intimacy and separation.

I think I only asked for one change, and it was for completely practical reasons. The first version was a very pale blue, maybe even white.

I used to work at a bookstore and I always felt like white jackets showed dirt and smudges more, so I asked for a slightly darker shade of blue. The final palette suits the tone of the novel—it’s wistful, but with splashes of color that signal brightness and hope. For the Canadian edition, they put a glossy treatment on the globe, which is also lovely.

—Alix Ohlin, author

I was lucky enough to design the covers for Alix Ohlin’s books The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories when I was in-house at Knopf. I loved both and so I was thrilled to work on Inside for art director Carol Devine Carson.

From the first page, I had images of wintry cold whites in my mind. The main character, Grace, is out cross-country skiing and discovers a man who has unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide in the woods. As I read deeper, an underlying theme emerged: the danger and thrill of letting ourselves be available and vulnerable. Grace is determined to help the man to the point of exhaustion. (I can’t reveal what happens between those two, though. You have to read it!)

A snow globe seemed like the perfect metaphor to depict the idea that we all want to get “inside” and connect to each other. That we never really know what anyone is truly thinking despite how intimate we may be.

So I started looking for images of snow globes online. But the ones I found had random floaty things inside and dated-looking wooden bases. Ohlin’s writing is soulful and witty, and I thought that the cover should look fresh.

I decided to produce it on my own and was lucky to find a snow globe kit online which I sent to the wonderful photographer Simon Lee. We painted the base white and he shot it on a frosty white background. First I was tempted to make the type look like it was being shaken inside the globe with the snow, but on the other hand, it needed to be easily readable and direct. Especially great one-word titles should be in plain view for the reader.

Initially, I submitted several backup directions, like the safety cone and the woman in the snow, but my gut was with the snow globe because it seemed more iconic. And who doesn’t love a snow globe?

—Gabriele Wilson, designer

(Melville House, 2011)

I can’t say enough about Christopher’s work—not only with regards to my book, which I adore, but about all of his work at Melville House. I consider him, quite simply, one of the best in the business, and there’s no one I’d rather work with.

My book presented Christopher with a unique challenge, because it’s inspired by another book: John Muir’s beloved automotive manual (of the same title) from the 1970s.

Muir’s book has a very familiar sensibility, and one which I feel evokes a specific era. What’s more, my novel is very strange and difficult to summarize: it tells the story of a man who is a single parent to a Volkswagen, and it features a tree which steals hearts, a character with two sides, and many other strangeities. Before I saw the galleys of my book, I couldn’t help but wonder how Christopher would handle all of this: would he reference Muir’s book directly? Or somehow try to render the strange universe of the book?

Above all, though, Christopher is an incredibly perceptive reader. His design for my book not only transcended my predictions and concerns; it reminded me what my book is truly about. The story may feature talking Volkswagens and heart-attack trees, but the true inquiry of the novel concerns the confrontation of mystery. The book itself, therefore, is a slightly mysterious object—Christopher’s design suggests a worn manual, and includes a diagram with a heart at its center. To me, the design scheme seems both familiar and strange, both off-kilter and inviting.

I have no doubt that Christopher’s design attracted many readers who might have looked past my book otherwise. I’m indebted to him for this—his impact on my career has been immeasurable.

—Christopher Boucher, author

As soon as I saw the first page of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, I knew I’d never read anything like it before. And when I say first page, I mean first page: the manuscript came with a blurb from the state of Colorado and another from the Daily Thermos heralding it as “a work of consummate rice.” The table of contents is labeled, “At the Morning Tables of the Miss Florence Diner.” In this book, trees are vicious criminals, time is literally money, and the narrator’s infant son is a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. It is a funny, profound, deeply moving, and weird, weird novel about language, grief, and the unconditional love that comes with fatherhood.

And it is also a car repair manual.

More specifically, it is How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, a meticulously illustrated bible of hippiedom published in 1969, which gave Christopher’s book its title and structure. We bought some copies of the original to keep on hand for reference, and while it seemed like a natural starting point for our cover, we wanted to make sure our book still stood on its own—after all, in setting and style it is completely contemporary, to say the least.

In the end, I did what I usually do, which is to steal an idea for the cover directly from the manuscript. In this case, the narrator’s son—who, again, is a car—has a heart in place of an engine, so I printed off an image I found online and showed it to our publishers:

“It’ll be like this exploded diagram of a car, but with a heart in place of the engine.”

“OK!”

And then I just had to figure out how to make it work. Not knowing much about cars myself, I downloaded a bunch of service manuals, studied the illustrations, and identified parts that could conceivably (within the realm of this fictional universe) connect to the valves of the heart. Many hours of pen-tool-ing later, I had something that seemed to capture what the book really is: a service manual for the human heart. As an extra joke, in keeping with the synesthetic shapeshifting that takes place throughout the narrative, the parts identified in the legend to the diagram would all be body parts: appendix, liver, gallbladder, etc.

At the risk of talking about more than just covers, we carried the conceit into the book’s interior as well: key words (“transmission,” “clutch,” “promises”) are bolded, chapters open with bulleted lists of the tools required for the emotional procedures that follow, and black tabs in the outer margin mark your place—you can see them on the face of the book when it’s closed, which really completes the effect.

When Christopher saw what we’d come up with, he wrote in to say his only concern was that he’d be breaking the time-honored tradition of authors objecting to their covers. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with him a few times, and he is truly one of the kindest and loveliest people I’ve ever met. This Christmas he sent us gingerbread cookies, and in the box we found a series of heart-stoppingly adorable photos. They were of his newborn son, who is not a car.

—Christopher King, designer

The event featured video comments from designers Amy C. King, Marc Cozza and Rebecca Cohen, and Miriam Rosenbloom as well as the unveiling of the cover for Lethem’s forthcoming novel Dissident Gardens, to be published by Doubleday in September. Here, audio and video corresponding to each of the covers discussed.

Gun, with Occasional Music (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994)

Amnesia Moon (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995)

The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996)

As She Climbed Across the Table (Doubleday, 1997)

Girl In Landscape (Doubleday, 1998)

Motherless Brooklyn (Doubleday, 1999)

Kafka Americana (Subterranean Press, 1999; W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)

This Shape We’re In (McSweeney’s, 2000)

The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday, 2003)

Men and Cartoons (Doubleday, 2004)

The Disappointment Artist (Doubleday, 2005)

The Fortress of Solitude (Vintage Contemporaries, 2004)

The design and publishing problem we had was how to package a book that was the follow-up to a very successful novel by the same author: Motherless Brooklyn. So we took the broad view and presented this book as the story of someone growing up in Brooklyn during a particular time period. There were a lot of interesting things going on in the book but whenever I would go too far in a particular direction, I felt it was ignoring other potential readers.

I do not think of this cover as particularly groundbreaking design, but I think it was a successful publishing solution. I also like to combine things that don’t necessarily go together. In this case, row houses and colorful, drop shadow-y, 70s type.

—John Gall, designer

You Don’t Love Me Yet (Doubleday, 2007)

Chronic City (Doubleday, 2009)

Chronic City (Faber and Faber, 2009)

The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978)

The Desperate Hours by Joseph Hayes (Random House, 1954)

Dissident Gardens (2013, Doubleday)

 (Special thanks to Bianca Barragan for organizing the event.)

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Why do we, in our time-starved moment, still appreciate the media that ask for your time? Take as a principle, for a second, that novels live in time the way films and music do, asking you to spend an iota of your human existence with them, while paintings or photographs live the way many poems do, asking you to respond with the least verbal part of your animal hindbrain to the immediacy of an image.

Coming from this consideration of time-based media, a first premise, I was curious to see what a book designer would find in Lola, California, a novel which contained all that I had known while growing up: the strange dark sexuality of California and our particular dystopian moment; the criminal glee and possibility of young friendship; the syncopation of memory within the relationship of a novel’s characters to their readers; how time feels to Vic Mahler, a man on death row and hence confined, as Alice James put it, to a room of last gestures within a state that offers you the endless potential to escape on a long ribbon of highway.

What faulty memory reminds me I may have sent on to Jennifer Carrow, the talented designer: some images by a friend, the New York photographer Dana Hoey, with an undeniably Northern Californian vintage, of a girl on a beach, and a movie she made of two teen girls frolicking in a wading pool; some images by Dafney Dabach of Highway 5, the vast, lonely north-south artery, forgotten by history and grand picturesque state plans, that connects the two hemispheres of the Californian consciousness; and perhaps a few other items.

I was intrigued that what came back was, on the rear cover, a perfectly anonymous photograph of one of those anywhere zones of California; a suggestion of smoggy light lifting off the back of mountains which could have been the Grapevine, an area mentioned in the novel, just north of Los Angeles, bordered by two factual, strangely placed palm trees and, in the foreground, a playground, a parking lot, an abandoned cipher into which you can either interject or lose yourself. In other words, exactly the kind of place memory moors and stumbles. You feel as if you have been in this place, you just can’t recall when or where or why it mattered, a state which imposes the constraint of eternal choice on its denizens and practitioners, in much the same way California does, the name itself a confection from an imaginary place in Don Quixote, the very first novel (or perhaps from a much earlier text; disputes reign, as they do with such slippery referents; cf. the note below this).

Since the title Lola, California refers to this impossible place, one that doesn’t exist, belonging to two girls once called Lola, I appreciated the blankness of the back, and then when I saw the front, the sepia-toned mystery of one girl’s almond-eyed gaze at another’s, so close but so unseeing, looking over one’s shoulder within the kind of light Rembrandt would have appreciated, I felt with animal instinct this cover was the right one, a kind of outtake from a Kerouac film if made by Cassavetes, while also appreciating the strange ripping of the text from the Ls to the Is, with its bleeding, graphic intention.

As for others’ response to it? A few booksellers have told me they liked the cover a great deal, while a few readers have said they were thrown off by the title and cover into thinking the book was chick lit, whatever that really might mean or should mean in a more utopian universe.

No matter; for me this cover is forever tattooed inside my consciousness, and seems to signify that possibility of friendship when both body and mind are mutating rapidly within a state so dedicated to change. As a title, Lola, California  means to me that you might be left, finally, with only sepia-toned memory as your last and best tracer, and this cover seems to offer the same hungry mystery.

—Edie Meidav, author

After reading the manuscript, I immediately began searching for ’70s and ’80s photographs of California. A few gems turned up on Flickr, but nothing felt quite right.

Before presenting any designs, an e-mail arrived from the editor suggesting that we show the two female characters on the jacket. I broadened my search and stumbled upon this great (not vintage, but ’70s-inspired) Diana Coca photo. It had the perfect mix of tension, secrecy, and intimacy that I was looking for. The softness of the photo begged for some crisp typography. The design came together rather quickly, and my hope was that the extended letters would hint at prison bars or at least the idea of something doubled or trapped.

The jacket was brought to a meeting as a full wrap, since I just wasn’t ready to give up the California landscape. I thought this sunny, bleached John Bennett Fitts photograph contrasted wonderfully with the two dark women. It was approved in-house and then went off to the author.

Meidav was great. Her only request, which I was happy to make, was to brighten the front photo slightly. I hope I’ll get to work on her next book.

—Jennifer Carrow, designer

This photograph was taken during a Ralph Gibson workshop in the PHotoEspaña photographic festival in Madrid, 2003. For the master classes we had the luxury of five gorgeous naked models. Most of the photographers decided to focus on the sexual fact of their nakedness. Instead, I was interested in capturing their feminine attitude and thoughtful-dreamy attitude, which models have eventually when they forget about us.

—Diana Coca, photographer

(Riverhead Books, 2012)

The cover Americans see is the first and only cover for Battleborn that Riverhead Books ever sent me. I loved it immediately, and said so immediately, and that was that.

My foreign covers were a different story: Lots and lots of neon lights on Battleborn abroad.

Initially, I resisted the UK cover for no more sophisticated a reason than it seemed so very familiar: a book about Nevada with a neon sign on the cover. Wah-womp. Along with a road stretching off into the distance, it was one of the images I most dreaded. But Michal Salu, the designer at my UK publisher, Granta Books, assured me that the design would be fresher and more evocative to a European audience not so inundated with imagery of the American West. Ultimately, I had to trust him on this. And this version does have an excellent texture.

The French cover for Battleborn—called simply Nevada in France—features neon, too, though the vibe is not so gritty. Why an ‘S’? Good question! I don’t know.

Call me an ugly American, but my heart belongs to the US cover of Battleborn. The image looked like Nevada to me, reminded me of the Mojave Desert homestead where I was raised, and where my parents’ ashes are spread. I love the foil type, which evokes silver mining and the way its decadent, toxic legacy is dusted throughout the stories.

My absolute favorite element of the book design is under the dust jacket, where my initials are stamped in foil.

I love the way a reader might uncover this, as so many characters in Battleborn are unearthing shimmering surprises.

—Claire Vaye Watkins, author

I’ll start off by saying that I loved these stories, and I’m proud of this cover because I feel it does what it’s supposed to, which is communicate the feeling of the book.

I think I’ve realized over time that I’m an emotional designer. I kind of hate to say that because I think it may touch on some gender issues in design. Maybe there’s a better way to say it, but what I mean is, my number one interest—besides making something beautiful and hopefully unusual and, well, good—is to communicate the way something feels. Its essence. I think that’s why I got into designing book covers. There’s so much to communicate! And since I have no content of my own I’d like to share with the world—the thing that makes me definitely a designer and not an artist—I’m very interested in trying to communicate words and ideas with images.

That is why I love design, and that is why I love designing for stories. I’m amazed at what a good writer can do. We all know this, how you can be taken somewhere with words. How you can live through someone else and have your own life revealed to you at the same time.

Claire’s stories really surprised me. The sheer force of them was unexpected. They are brutal and beautiful and human. That is really what I wanted to get across: the beauty and the brutality of them. The landscape, the setting, play as much of a role as the characters. In fact, I would say the landscape is a character here.

There were many things about the stories that resonated, and looking back through some of my old sketches, I see myself struggling to do something with those themes. One of the things that really struck me was an image from one of the stories, I don’t remember which, of the repercussions of the underground nuclear testing that was conducted in Nevada. Claire talks about the fact that the population is breathing silver dust as a result of the explosions. My lungs felt heavy reading that. And this for me was a moment where the characters are literally breathing in the landscape. The fact that silver is a precious metal, that it’s beautiful and yet it is causing the characters damage—I felt like this could be something I could use. The question was how.

I found a lot of images of the explosions, thinking it would be a nice way to show the power of the writing as well, but somehow nothing came of it. It was missing the feeling. It could have been powerful, maybe, if I could have figured out how to use it right, and yet it was somehow lacking.

I also see a bunch of images of rocks that I tried to use. They are interesting but cold.

I have to admit, it took me a while, but I kept coming back to this image of the silver dust in the air entering people’s lungs. And finally I got it somehow. The image just sort of appeared in my mind, probably while not sleeping one night. (This is not usually how it happens for me. I don’t generally have this eureka moment. Most of the time I come to my designs accidentally while trying to do something else entirely.) I wanted the type to be made up of silver particles and then dispersing throughout the cover. It would be beautiful, because it’s silver, and yet after reading the story, the reader would realize that it’s actually ominous.

I thought that overlaying the silver type on top of a striking photo of the landscape would be the perfect solution, and that could be the somewhat unusual part: the way the silver would interact with the blue sky. It took some time to find the right image, but I think this one is better than I could have imagined. The way that cloud floats over the ground, both beautiful and yet looking like it could fall down and crush you any minute.

The most interesting part to me is the way the different blue-gray values of the photograph interact with the lights and darks of the silver foil when the light hits it. Sometimes the silver just radiates light and jumps off the cover, and sometimes it recedes or turns darker than the image. Maybe not the best thing for readability but certainly an interesting and maybe a somewhat magical effect.

Looking at some of my latest covers, I notice that I’ve been using a lot of foil.

I used to reject foil almost completely, thinking it decorative and not ‘design.’ But now I actually find it to be an exciting element to play with if used in an unexpected way. In this case, I wouldn’t have been able to achieve my concept without it.

—Helen Yentus, designer

That picture, as most of mine are, was a rather offhand moment. I looked out into the wash from my house in Twentynine Palms, and because that cloud was so big but the sun so bright, it was making a miraculous light in the desert. Like anyone would, I thought I’d take a picture. It didn’t capture the light per se. But some kind of light and some kind of sensation got transmitted, I hope.

The picture has also been used on a 45 by an indie band called CB Brand. And I just saw it in a shelter magazine on the wall of an extremely glamourous art deco inspired apartment in Paris that couldn’t have been further from the desert shack-subject matter of the picture.

I haven’t read the book but judging from the cover it’s excellent.

—Jack Pierson, photographer

(Little, Brown & Company, 2012)

Soon after I sold Where’d You Go, Bernadette, my editor, Judy Clain, and I had the book jacket talk. I told her I wanted a bold, graphic cover. I then proceeded to jam her inbox with images of beautiful book jackets I wanted mine to be nothing like: ethereal women walking down gauzy paths, the sides of clapboard houses with peeling paint, the edges of windswept oceans with tufts of wispy grass, colored-glass bottles with sunlight twinkling through. Judy kindly told me she got my point, and not to fret, that she had Keith Hayes on the job.

A month later, I was at my computer and an email came through. The subject line, FWD:  WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE. I immediately knew it was my cover. I forwarded it to my boyfriend, George, and went into his office.

“I just e-mailed you my cover,” I said.

He jumped up, all excitement. “What do you think?”

“I haven’t looked at it. I want to have a moment of silence first, because I know my novel will never be the same.”

To authors, novels are a years-long head-swirl, manuscript pages printed on the back of menus, scenes scratched out on yellow pads, scraps of paper on the side table with a good word written on it, heaps of frustration, brain-bruising concentration, constant doubt. Seeing your jacket for the first time is the moment when you fully comprehend that what was once a private funhouse is now public. It’s a momentous and surreal shift.

George and I closed our eyes, took a breath, and opened the PDF.

Instantly, a smile hijacked my face. The image was so bold, the oversized dark glasses so iconic, the colors so fabulously off. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. As I write this, I’m looking at the cover, and I can’t get that same smile off my face.

There it was, my book. There it is, my book.

These days, almost everybody I talk to about Where’d You Go, Bernadette mentions its eye-catching, joyful cover. Booksellers flat-out tell me they think the book is selling so well because of its cover.

Now, when I think of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, I can barely access the years of doubt and frustration it took to write it. I only think about Keith Hayes’ terrific cover. And I can’t help but smile.

—Maria Semple, author

Maria’s book was pitched to us as a comic novel set in Seattle about a mother that goes missing. The only request for the jacket, that I can remember, was to have a strong, colorful, graphic text design. Images of St. Bernadette, Seattle, Antarctica, a ship porthole, etc., were offered as suggestions at our weekly jacket meeting. I quickly jotted everything down hoping to make sense of it all later on.

After reading the manuscript, I thought that designing the cover was going to be a bit of a challenge. Up to that point I don’t think I had worked on a comic novel.

I also really loved the book. That can sometimes create a bit of apprehensiveness before I actually sit down and start designing.

The best way for me to work is to clarify, right from the beginning, what I want the jacket to say. I wanted it to be obvious to the reader that this is a satirical novel. Funny and accessible, but also smart and literary. I made the decision to go in a more illustrative style as opposed to photographic. I kept going back to the request of having a strong title type treatment. Originally I liked this idea. I thought I could do big, hand-drawn type with some smaller spot illustrations. As I worked up some rough sketches I realized that something just wasn’t quite working. It just didn’t have any impact. I kept repeating the title over and over again. It reads like a question, so I did find it a challenge to work with.

It didn’t take too long to figure out that I was going to completely ditch the mostly typographic idea. I was thinking of a simple image that would come off as comical and that would resonate with this quirky title. I was trying to avoid putting Bernadette on the cover. I just thought it was too literal. I also couldn’t imagine it looking original. But I thought about Maria’s description of Bernadette. I thought that I could pull it off in a fresh way using simple, graphic shapes. Normally, I would hire an illustrator for this but I had no clear direction to give them. I didn’t know where the type would fall. This I needed to do myself. The inspiration for the illustration is pulled from a scene in the book.

The approval process on this project was much smoother than many of the books that I have worked on. I think besides for an earlier round where I rendered Bernadette in an odd way, this got approved immediately thereafter. After I presented it in a jacket meeting, Judy Clain, the book’s editor, sent it off to Maria. I don’t remember exactly what her response was, but I do remember that she loved it.

Maria is an amazingly talented author and a wonderfully supportive person. I look forward to the possibility of working on her next book.

—Keith Hayes, designer

(Hogarth, 2012)

Even before I sold my book, I think, I mentioned to my agent how much I loved Rachel Papo’s photographs of female Israeli soldiers from the project Serial No. 3817131. I noticed them years before, and I think Papo took them close to the same time I myself was a soldier in the army. The details in them felt familiar, as if she was photographing my own service. Except she got to take pictures from moments in which an actual soldier would not have had access to a camera.

When it came time to decide on a U.S. cover, I mentioned the photographs again. At first, my editor said they were thinking more along the lines of doing an illustration—I think so people wouldn’t confuse the book with a nonfiction book. But I didn’t like any of the illustrations. It is hard to capture an image that is female, a soldier, and Israeli at the same time. Then they took their own photographs, of a girl in a tank top wearing a dog tag, but it just did not look like an Israeli soldier, and I didn’t like it. At the end they chose to use one of Papo’s pictures, completely independently, I think, of my suggesting these photographs to them.

This wasn’t one of the photographs I chose first, but it was the one they chose and I like it. They also created a font and chose a color for the title and placed it on the photograph. I think I like the cover; I certainly like the picture, as I do all of Papo’s pictures. But then again I am not at all a visual person so what do I know?

—Shani Boianjiu, author

This soldier is resting in the shade during a hot October day. Her unit is out in the desert training for their first hand grenade throwing. It was so hot that day that the soldiers were commanded by their officers to drink a full canteen of water every half hour to avoid dehydration. They all seemed exhausted.

When I told the group that I was working on a project photographing girls in the army, one soldier laughed and said: “We realize we are girls only in the shower!” This particular soldier was sitting quietly, not interacting with the others, drawing circles in the sand with a burnt match, alone with her thoughts. I noticed a faded stamp on the back of the soldier’s hand—perhaps a remnant from a night out to a club with friends back home on a Friday night.

—Rachel Papo, photographer