I would like to welcome my wonder and amazing friend Natalie Corbett Sampson to my blog today!!! Yes, I did tell her she could write about octopi, I was not kidding!! But she went with something else!!
I can't wait to read the book Natalie!!
I can't wait to read the book Natalie!!
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Thanks for having me Jess! You suggested I could write about ‘anything’. My first choice was octopi. They are so awesome. But then I got lost in a dark hole of youtube videos of colour changing eight legged sea creatures and realized not only is it probably not the most on-topic conversation but also if I started your readers down that road they may never come back.
Then I thought, what about the cover? No one has talked about the cover yet! Everyone knows you don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but com’on. Everyone judges books by the covers!
My beautiful cover was done by Valerie Bellamy from Dog-Ear Book Design (http://www.dog-earbookdesign.com). I met Valerie in Starbucks, with my own designs and ideas. She was very polite and looked at my sketches, wrote down my thoughts and after a few weeks she sent me some designs. The first two were based on my ideas, lots of font and bold colour, they were quite nice. The third blew me away. It had nothing to do with what we had discussed. It was perfect.
What does a bird have to do with the story? The bird can be connected to the mascot of a commonly used social media platform. It’s also in reference to Harper Lee’s story that Henry and Thomas read for their English class. Valerie imagined Henry as the mockingbird, the innocent that is targeted and destroyed with violence. (And when I say that, don’t think I’m spoiling any part of the story!) I loved these connections so much that I changed Henry’s Tuesday shirt from red to blue. Well first we tried to change the cover tones from blue to red but it totally didn’t work.
I also loved the way Valerie used space to convey emotion. The lack of content on the cover, around the smaller font, the bird, is haunting and beautiful. The single feather on the back always makes me think of a void, the silence of that feather settling down, as if the world has stopped around it. It is the perfect echo of the story.
And in the end I did get to have a part in the design. The font Valerie used for the cover did not have a hashtag, so I got to draw one. Yay me!
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Thank you Natalie for visiting my blog today!! I love the cover!! It Should Have Been A #GoodDay is available on February 28th, but you can pre-order HERE through Amazon!!
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