One of the best parts of book publishing is getting to pick a cover design. Designers generally supply us with a few different concepts from which to choose, then we tinker with the winning concept until we settle on a final cover.
Of course, by the time we get those initial concepts, we’ve narrowed down the options significantly simply by choosing a designer. For Burdens by Water, for instance, we chose DR.ME, a British design duo specializing in collage art. For ParentShift we chose Alban Fischer, whose clean, sophisticated style was exactly what we were going for (as opposed to stick figure drawings or pictures of random children that too often adorn the covers of parenting books.)
As for the Trove cover, we chose Joan Wong, the most well-known designer with whom we’ve ever worked. The award-winning covers include Crazy Rich Asians, We Should All Be Feminists and — my personal favorite — All the Birds, Singing. (An excellent novel, if you’ve never read it.)
From there, though, we still have a big decision to make. In this case, Joan supplied us with the following three concepts, each quite different. I loved the way she kept our branded cover border (which doesn’t show up in the first concept unfortunately), but also played around with it. I’d hoped she’d do that.
In the end, while we thought concept #2 was strong and striking, it was ultimately #1 that won our hearts.
What do you think? Did we make the right call?
