The Making of a Book Cover 4.0
The seeds of the first three novels in the Boston Classics series were stories from my own past working as an actor in Boston in the late 80’s and early 90’s, but this one was different in that I pulled threads from all over the place – my experience as well as others’ and just the well of my imagination. Bella just kind of showed up in WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR as this mysterious character, someone who’d been on a soap but left it and was now auditioning for this little Shakespeare company (based very loosely on a friend’s experience working in daytime TV). Then in FORGET ABOUT ME she played the role of a boy servant onstage (I also played Speed in Two Gents) and Ben’s goofy pal offstage. Her secrets started to build in my mind and as I was writing YOU SPIN ME, her past got clearer to me, and I figured out how she ended up a single mom. I couldn’t wait to write her story, but that of her hero, Henry was a bit more elusive. Thankfully, I’m stubborn and I have good author pals, a great editor, and friends and family in my life who will listen to me yammer on about plot and character things I’m trying to figure out, so this book will finally be in reader’s hands December 1**… I actually just remembered this long, awkward but very useful conversation I had with my eldest daughter and her boyfriend about the various ways Bella and Henry’s “encounter” might’ve happened, and whether or not alcohol should be involved… Anyhoo… back to the cover design. I jumped the gun and spilled in an earlier blog about the visual inspiration for Bella and Henry, and you can see that here. Like Puck in FORGET ABOUT ME, I knew that Bella’s daughter Lilah needed to be on this cover. The question was – what grouping of the three would communicate the layers of conflict between Bella and Henry regarding this little girl? I found a lot of nice photos (some of which you’ll see in promo graphics for the book) but none that showed exactly what I was looking for. I sent them all to Lana, with the input that: The little girl is a magnet that draws them together despite other tensions between them – they put her welfare first. I’m thinking that the couple might be walking away, looking over their shoulders like in the photo of the couple with the picnic basket, but perhaps with a bit more distance between them. We can see them in profile, her expression a little more wary, his can be more joyous. Instead of the basket, . . .
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