I Got A Surprising Email From My Publisher Yesterday

and it said...

Hello Brooke! It’s time for us to get to work on the cover of your third novel: All the Summers In Between.

They were having an in-house cover meeting to brainstorm possible directions for the artwork, and my (AWESOME) editorial team asked if I could share any photos that inspired me while writing the book. Or, if I had any ideas in general about the new cover to share with the art department.

Recently, I told you about some of the photos I was working from as I write my fourth novel, and I also showed you what the new paperback of On Gin Lane looks like. So I had to stop and think: What had inspired me when I was writing All the Summers last spring?

I pulled together a response that went something like this. I had the idea for All the Summers while on vacation in Maine. We were in one of those small charming oceanfront towns, and our hotel offered a boat ride to Main Street so you could cruise, rather than drive, to dinner. As we sped along the shoreline in a small powerboat, I noticed a Victorian house up on a gentle hill. The house wasn’t elaborate, just pretty, and it sat above a small private inlet. I can’t remember now if there was a sailboat in the harbor or if I imagined there was, but that sailboat became the lynchpin of my next novel. Because I could see a woman in her thirties sailing into the harbor to see an old friend who lived in the house. The friends had been estranged for ten years, but one of them needed something life or death — and she was arriving on her boat with a very large request.

In thinking of the cover now, I immediately think of that general vision: A modest but pretty house on a hill overlooking the water, maybe with a sailboat bobbing below. I think of a fashionable woman on a sailboat staring up at the house, or I can see the woman who lives in the house holding a pair of binoculars and looking out on the sailboat, trying to figure out whose boat it is.

The work of artist T.S. Harris would be perfect for my cover, if she’d agree to custom draw us an illustration. Her work endlessly inspires me because she captures in art what I try to capture on paper: brooding mid-century women finding moments of empowerment, women hunting for their destiny, women who are bruised but resilient. I sent along a few of her paintings as ideas, too. All of the illustrations you’ve been seeing in this post are hers.

Sometimes other authors book covers inspire me, too. Even though The Lost Summers of Newport is an entirely different story, I find that a similar themed scene could work on my latest novel. Have you ever read Virginia Hume’s wonderful novel Haven Point? That one is set in Maine, and I woke up yesterday morning thinking about how perfect a similar cover might work on All the Summers.

As you’re reading this, the art department at my publisher is hard at work at coming up with imagery, and I’ll share more with you as soon as I can. But I would like you to know just how involved an author is in their cover design. It may be more than most people realize. In coming weeks, I’ll write about the covers of my last novels. Both of them have a very interesting back story.

xo Have a lovely day.