by mybookcover
(The Penguin Press, 2011) This was the only version of the cover I ever saw for the US edition, and at first I wasn’t wild about it. I thought the colors were a little too South Beach, and that it was altogether too enigmatic. Since the title of the book is already something of a mystery, I thought the cover should do a better job of telegraphing that the book was about memory. I also felt that given the playfulness of […]
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by mybookcover
(Little, Brown and Company, 2001) Every cover design has its challenges, but I remember this cover as being particularly daunting. After reading Rick’s short story “Demonology” for the first time, I was so affected by it that I actually read it to my to my girlfriend (now wife) over the telephone that evening. I (Rick) made her cry. Also adding to the difficulty was that, in this case, the cover had to work for a collection of different short stories. So I […]
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by mybookcover
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) What do you think makes a book cover successful? What are some of your favorites? A good cover should be visually arresting and true to the feel and content of the book; it should also, ideally, look like nothing else. Probably my favorite series of covers were the Penguin Classics of the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s—well-selected art in an elegant graphical setting. Paperback covers in general feel to me more integral to the book […]
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by mybookcover
(Bloomsbury, 2012) I’ve been incredibly lucky thus far vis-à-vis book covers. My first book, The Half-Life, featured a painting by my close friend Mike Brophy, and my second book, Livability, featured a painting by another friend, Chris Johanson. In both cases, the artists were integral to the inspiration of the fiction and so the appearance of their art on the cover helped complete the whole circuit in my mind. In this new book, Rain Dragon, I was lucky enough to work with yet another friend, […]
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