As I mentioned before, Break On Through is already available on pre-order, and now– so exciting– we have a cover!
It would be physically impossible for me to be any happier with the way this book is book is shaping up, illustration and design-wise. When I gaze upon it, I buzz with glee. My nervous system is at its limit.
How this cover came to be is something of a publishing miracle, as far as I understand it. All authors are not equally lucky in this regard. Maureen Johnson, for instance, can write about just about anything from death to monkeys, and nine times out of ten, the cover of her book will feature a faceless hippy waif baring her abs in the service of young adult literature. (The tenth time, the waif will have a face.)
Quoth the long-suffering but insuppressible Maureen:
“This cover is in keeping with my other covers, all of which illustrate my love of fantastic abs. That’s mainly what I write about. Great abs. The rest is window dressing.
(Also, I love the new pinkness. That is the exact shade of pink I want for my stun gun! It’s FATE!)”
I think my editor, Lara Hinchberger may have been directly channeling Maureen when she told me early on: “the cover will not have a girl cropped from the nose to the hips.” Phew! But that wasn’t even all of the magic.
For that, we have to go back in time to the beginning of the first draft, when I was poking around online instead of writing (I think I may have been checking out the B-Girl Be summit.) and I happened to discover a mural by graf artist Siloette that reminded me of my main character, Nadine. From that moment on, whenever the going got sluggish, as it necessarily does during first drafts, I would look at that image, and it would anchor the character in my mind and give me a little burst of inspiration and the energy to write something instead of playing Minesweeper or checking my email again.
When the time came to submit the manuscript to publishers, my agent, LaS, very optimistically suggested we add the image and a few of my own line drawings of b-girls to the back of the package, telling me in no uncertain terms not to expect anything. And when Doubleday opted to publish Break On Through, Lara acknowledged the mural and suggested that they would try to stick “close to something along those lines.”
I was a little worried at that point. I had no idea who the designer might be, or what her background was, and, well… attempts at a hip-hop feel by people not already entrenched in the hip-hopiverse can be awkward. Visions of faux-fiti-strewn brick walls filled my head. Urged by LaS to put it out of my mind, I braced myself to accept whatever might come. I even prepared myself for the possibility that it would be all pink.
That was the last I heard about the cover until July, when the above illustration suddenly appeared in my inbox. It had the spirit of the original mural– so strong– but it was brand new, and so, so beautiful. I was sitting at my desk in a client’s office, and I almost cried. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else properly for the rest of the day.
So, a big thank you is due to Lara for championing it and Siloette for her illustration and inspiration, and the designer, Jennifer Lum, for looking so hard for the right font and coaxing the whole thing together. Her work shines even brighter on the back cover, which is also spectacular, but you’ll just have to pick up the book to find out about that.
I just hope I haven’t already used up all my miracles…
P.S. The synopsis is up now too. You can get a look over here.
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