Last week's winner of the signed ARC of Aimee Friedman's Sea Change is... Sophie Brookover! Congrats, SB! Send me your address.Today, Serena Robar is here to share a Cover Story and give away a book! Bonus. Read on:
"Every publisher is different. With my last publisher, they asked me what I thought the covers should look like and I would write a detailed email and send it to them, which they promptly disregarded and then did their own thing. Since I'm a writer and not a cover artist, maybe my cover ideas would not have sold the books as well as what they chose. It's always a concern that you will get a cover that doesn't portray the tone of your book accurately and have a negative impact on sales.
"I've only asked for a change once in my book-writing history. In Fangs4Freaks I asked that the girl on the front not have black nail polish, since the heroine vampire was a cheerleader and loved pink. They switched it to a deep, hot pink. In my opinion, she should have had a pink French manicure but in the end it wasn't a issue I was willing to raise a stink over. And to be honest, they would have ignored me if I had. Writers have literally no say over what their covers look like.
"With Giving Up the V, I really had no idea what the cover would look like and they didn't ask me. I found out they were doing a model shoot for the cover when my editor told me it was about to happen. I was pretty excited to learn they actually set up a traditional photography shoot.
"One of the things I hear about my cover is how wonderful that they used a realistic model on the cover. She isn't anorexic, she looks healthy. This makes me laugh because my heroine is supposed to be a 'bigger' girl. The model on the cover is New York's idea of a chunky teen.
"I loved the cover when I first saw it! Since I had no expectation and was up for anything, I was well and truly delighted. I thought the font and doodles on the cover really evoked the tone of a light, fun read. I suppose my only beef would be that my name is so small. When you view the cover online, you can't even see my name since they use a very thin, crayon font. With every book my name seems to get smaller and smaller on the front cover, but traditionally it should be getting bigger! Guess I never do anything the 'right' way.
"I asked them to darken the font and make my name bigger. They did darken the font but my name stayed the same. Overall, I was really very pleased with the cover so I am tickled with the end result.
"At my house, my books are all referred to as the 'midriff books' since almost all of them feature the middle section of a girl's body. This is a popular trend in cover art today. Just the body of the model with little or no facial features present. Sometimes I put my books face-out on my bookshelf and put Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series face-out on the bookshelf above mine just to see what my covers would look like with a complete person on the front, lol."
I love book cover play like that! And yay for a healthy-body cover model (who has kind of a bangin' body, right?)! I also really like the playful crayon font. What do you guys think? Comment below for a chance to win a signed copy of Giving Up the V, courtesy of Serena!
PS-Serena Robar is giving away book a day, every day, in honor of her latest book release. All you have to do to is sign up for her newsletter and you are entered to win. Enter once and you are in the running to win a book every day in the month of June. Whoa! (Today she's giving away Lovestruck Summer, yay!)