A Reading Daydreamer: you don't know me

Hi guys, Beverley here! Are you surprised to hear from me? Unfortunately, I'm not returning early from my hiatus as much as I would like to - revision is making me crazy!!! Anyway, I don't want to bog you down with my school news... in fact, I want to welcome Sophia Bennett to the blog for her blog tour of You Don't Know Me! I'm a big fan of Sophia and I jumped at the chance to take part so today, I have a guest post about the cover to share with all of you lovely people. Enjoy!

***

It was all so good. Sasha and Rose. Best friends in a band, singing together. Right up to the finals of Killer Act when the judges tell them one of them must go Suddenly their friendship is put to the ultimate test. On TV in front of millions. Two girls. One huge mistake. Can they ever forgive each other?

[summary taken from Goodreads]

The Cover Story

I always enjoy writing about covers. When I visit schools I increasingly talk about them, because we’ve all got our opinion – usually a strong one – and the cover are is important to a book’s success, even though the writing takes months or years, and the cover takes … well, a depressingly short time by comparison, if you happen to be the writer.

Although you’d like to think they do, cover illustrators don’t actually go through your manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, looking for the perfect scene to represent exactly. They get a few sentences giving them a rough idea about what the story is about, and off they go. However, my publisher Rachel knows that I like to put a mood board together for each book, to give me a visual sense of what I’m working towards while I’m writing, and now she likes to see it before she thinks about the cover. This is very flattering. Here was the picture I sent her for You Don’t Know Me:

Rachel also asked if I had any ideas in mind for the cover, because when she asked me about The Look I told her I was thinking of something with a magazine cover feel: the cropped face of a girl staring out strongly from the page. And that’s pretty much what we ended up going for.

This time, I was thinking more in terms of a girl in a spotlight, ready to sing. Possibly a girl with a not-so-size-zero body shape, which would make a refreshing change. I found a few things online, including some fan art for an idealised Selena Gomez album cover, and suggested these:

I think the golden eye was inspired by the Adele covers. (Note the Adele theme creeping through my inspirations here.) We both liked how graphic and strong it was. It reminded us a bit of the cover of ‘The Look’. Also, by looking down, the eye seemed somehow mysterious and possibly sad, which suited the darker elements of the book.

I like to think that maybe the eye inspired what came next, because the ‘girl in the spotlight’ idea didn’t make it through. This time, Rachel wanted to commission a photo for the cover, though, which was exciting. She suggested a photographer called Rosie Hardy, whose website is here, and Rosie’s mysterious, artistic, romantic images looked wonderful to me.

Coincidentally, Rosie has a picture of Janet Devlin on the site – an X Factor finalist from 2011 – who was one of the many people I was thinking of when I wrote the character of Rose. Rosie also did the cover for Rachel Ward’s new book, The Drowning, which is a self-portrait. Of Rosie, not Rachel. So now you know.

Rosie took a picture of a girl looking down and we ended up with a cover like this:

I liked it, but I didn’t love it, apart from those turquoise page edges, which are fabulous. Some other people in the process felt the same, so the picture went through some colour tweaks, ending up like this:

Which I think is much stronger. Big sigh of relief.

I’ve since shown it to a couple of secondary school classes, to get their opinion. One girl said ‘It looks as though she’s sad and she’s thinking about something’, which seemed pretty accurate. Another one said ‘She looks like she’s doing something on her phone,’ which made me laugh because in the story the main character, Sasha Bayley, is almost surgically attached to her phone. It’s what drives the plot. So I think we got there in the end.

I say ‘we’ – I was just an interested observer on this one. I think Chicken House got there in the end. I hope so, anyway. What do you think?

***

Thank you, Sophia for writing such a lovely post! I love hearing about the cover story for different books and I was intrigued to hear about the process behind the glowing cover of You Don't Know Me. I adore the idea of a mood board - I think I'm going to make my own one for a 'book' I'm planning to write after exams!

And if you haven't already, be sure to pick up a copy of You Don't Know Me - I'm currently reading it and LOVING it!

As usual, please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments! And I look forward to my return in June, when I can fully resume blogging 'duties' :D

Happy reading,

Beverley xxx

P.S. If any of you have exams coming up, GOOD LUCK!