I am so excited to share with you the brand-new cover for The Things We’ll Never Have. You’ll recognize the same color scheme, the same style, and the three characters are even still in the piazza, but they have turned their backs on us. But that’s better than it sounds!
I have received plenty of compliments on the cover, but a few readers let me know that they thought the book was going to be a comedy.
In life and indeed in writing, you can’t keep changing things to suit the whim of others, but I find it’s always a good idea to at least listen to what people say. It might be a simple question of taste, then again, they might well be giving me a nudge toward making something better, as in this case.
By turning Everleigh, Marta, and Olivia around, I’ve brought the cover more closely into line with historical fiction cover trends, allowing the reader to come up with their own version of what the characters look like.
Way back when, books didn’t even have illustrations on the covers. Books were reserved for scholars and monks and their ivory or silk covers, at times inlaid with gems and gold, served as an ornate protection and decorative tribute to the cultural authority of the often hand-made pages.
The printing revolution of the 1450s saw a shift to leather covers. It wasn’t until the 1820s that mechanical book binding using cloth, and later paper, began to replace leather, and embossing or gold illustrations and words gave the first glimpses into what lay within the covers.
Nineteenth-century poster-artists and graphic designers steered covers toward advertising and communicating information about the text inside, and at last, books started to have full illustrations on their jackets.
Some famous early illustrated book covers include volumes of The Yellow Book illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, the iconic Francis Cugar cover of The Great Gatsby, a luminous face gazing over a glittering cityscape, and the first cover for The Hobbit which, incidentally, was original art by J. R. R. Tolkien.
It was and still is rare for an author to do their own cover art. I am swooning to think I stand alongside Tolkien by doing the cover art for The Things We’ll Never Have. Okay. Swoon over. I have returned Tolkien to his well-deserved pedestal and returned my feet to solid ground.
Nowadays, a cover has a big role to play in a book’s success, enticing a reader to choose it among the millions available. There’s no easy formula for designing a cover, at least that I know of, but for this cover, I have attempted to communicate the genre more clearly to readers, plus I have tried to use posture to capture something about each of the characters and their relationship to each other. Everleigh is eager as she arrives, suitcase in hand. Olivia is hesitant; Marta is fed up. I hope the way I have them standing shows the conflict between them.
It’s too early to say if I’ll design the cover of the novel I’m currently working on, which still doesn’t have a title, but I do know I will be doing some major research for the story in just a few weeks, traveling to the south coast of England to the hometown of my protagonist, Mary Anning. I can’t wait to tell you about it!