Maybe You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover

 My first novel LILY will be reprinted later this year, 30 years after the first edition came out in 1992. It's going to be great to have the book back in print. Electronic versions have been available but the book went out of print around 2001 and since then, only used copies could be found on various bookselling sites. I almost never see copies of the mass market paperback out there. I suppose those aren't worth anything anymore. But at any rate, LILY will be out this time in trade paperback and with an all new cover. 

I like the new cover. It's always hard to get used to something new, but I think the cover is pretty and does invoke the story -- a thing a cover is supposed to do to my mind. I've had some book covers I wasn't wild about. I was actually never wild about the original LILY hardcover art. It's reminiscent of Marc Chagall, but for me it always made the book look cartoonish, and since it has a 15-year-old protagonist, the inclination of reviewers was to categorize it as a YA novel, which it most definitely is not. There's too much sex, for one thing, enough in fact to get it banned from some school libraries. But that's a story for another blog post. The point being, the writer doesn't always, or often, have much say with traditional publishers about the cover art of their book. I did manage to get them to take the sequaro cactus the artist had originally drawn into the background out to be replaced by the hillock and trees. The artist was from Spain, and I guess had watched too many Sergio Leoni spaghetti westerns. The part of Texas, Bastrop County, where LILY takes place is rolling hills and lots of pine trees, so the second try came out better, although those trees look suspiciously like cypress trees to me. Ah well...

When foreign rights started coming in on LILY, it was interesting to see that the Spanish version opted to use the same cover but changed to the title to La Inocencia de Lily, a charming change, I thought. I never had a chance to see the cover art for the German version, but British LILY was moody blue and more adult, sort of mysterious. I liked it well enough. They published in both hardcover and soft simultaneously, something that didn't take hold in the USA until recently. And of course, this was way before the eBook revolution. But on all these cover, Lily herself was all wrong. She was never a blonde as in the Chagall-like version, and British LILY is far too mature-looking, although I did like that the British cover seemed to take the book more seriously as literature.

The mass-market version was done in a lovely way, with a stepback cover and a vellum overlay that lets a smoky image of the stepback seep through. And it was cool how they highlighted my name at the top with a banner beneath. And they got Lily's hair color correct.

Anyway the point is the cover art, what to expect, the initial reactions when you finally see it, all of those are part of the anticipation and excitement of having a book come out. I'm getting used to the latest cover art, and liking it more and more. I hope it will bring a new generation of readers to LILY.

Onward....

  

Stepback cover