Welcome to My Book! Boundless Has a Cover Now
A book cover starts the conversation you want to have with your reader. It’s a moment of recognition and surprise. Here is my path to a cover becoming the cover.
I knew it had to have a horizon.
That’s about all I could envision for the cover of Boundless, my empty-nest memoir that publishes this month (Atmosphere Press).
I call Boundless a road trip to rejuvenation. And because all good road trips like to trouble you with “tiny but frightening requests,”* it is not a straight path.
This book asks you: “When you have become no one, how do you become someone again?”
After I signed my book deal, the path to my cover design was part joy ride, part driving off the map. Not a surprise, really, because at some point in Boundless, I suggest it’s possible that the road to nowhere goes everywhere.
A few design ideas traveled to nowhere. I’m hoping you think this one can take you everywhere.
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Boundless is available for pre-order!
My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024! Read about it here. Get on the mailing list here.
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BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
Come on over to carolynflynn.com and sign up for the mailing list to get news about Living Boundlessly, Story Catalyst writing craft classes and Uncommon Hours productivity for creatives. Get a free downloadable book club discussion guide for Boundless at carolynflynn.com.
Why design matters
It’s hard to imagine the cover design for your own book. I hadn’t had this much say in the cover design for my first seven books, published by Penguin. At the time I didn’t give that much thought, only to feel grateful to Penguin for the illustration and the pithy blurb from an influential person.
Strange, because I’m a designer! Before I was an author, one leg of my journey through the newspaper and magazine publishing world included not writing and editing, but design. My publications received international recognition. I did redesign consulting (the most exciting gig was in Bermuda) and spoke about it at conferences (the most exciting gig was Barcelona).
That part of my life was a visual wonderland, as I borrowed from book covers, CD/album covers and wine labels for ideas about typography and illustration. I became a devotee of Louise Fili, someone whose work you surely have noticed if you have ever loved all things Italy or typography.
For a long, long time, I’ve been fascinated with how writing, editing and design add up to one bold message. The combination produces a visceral reaction—a memorable and remarkable bolt of recognition.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. But—are you kidding me?—the cover is your first and best way to communicate what your book is and who it is for. It’s your first conversation with the reader. You want to get that right.
Your book cover is a “Welcome, I see you.” Something on your cover recognizes your reader.
Your book cover asks, “Do you see this, too? I’ve been thinking about this, and I’d like to share it with you.” That’s kind of a miracle—we think it’s magic because it goes to work on our subconscious. Visual language fuses with the words—a great title that hooks the reader—and suddenly you and your reader are in the middle of a conversation like you arrived at the right party. It always starts close in, as in, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Remember, your reader doesn’t want to be your customer—your reader wants to be your friend.
Where to start the conversation
During the writing of Boundless, I realized the conversation I was having on page after page after page was with the sky. The symphonic sky seemed to accompany me and the twins when we talked about college choices as the sun set in New Mexico and spilled pink all around us. The pale blue sky seemed to close down and constrict me when I moved 2,200 miles away, to the miniature skies of upstate New York. All of our conversations were about becoming, and it seemed the sky wanted in on the game.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the
most mysterious element in our domain is the sky. Its presence
is everywhere, these questions, too, all around us and above us,
prisms that hold the light and bend it to a mountain. The sky is
our ally because it has much bigger fish to fry. It’s not that the sky
doesn’t care about our problems—it’s just that our problems are
so solvable from its perspective.
Excerpt from BOUNDLESS
The sky became the most mysterious element in our domain, changing colors, endlessly stretching on, promising this place or another place, something that would answer the questions of where would the twins go—the answer: anywhere but here—and where would I go.
Throughout the story, the sky was faithfully present everywhere. It became a conversation partner—and an ally. “It’s not that the sky doesn’t care about our problems—it’s just that our problems are so solvable from its perspective,” I write. In this way, the sky became the friend that wasn’t going away.
The perfect, not perfect, design
Yet my cover design odyssey includes trips through Georgia O’Keeffe, the Wizard of Oz and the AI multiverse, to name a few.
Early on, it struck me that Boundless is set in two places where O’Keeffe came into her element as a painter. Naturally, after living in New Mexico for 25 years, I knew how Ghost Ranch had shaped her as an older, autonomous woman artist. What I didn’t know until I moved unexpectedly to upstate New York was that as a 20-year-old, she came to Lake George to paint.
This postcard was one of my treasures from a visit to Wiawaka, founded by two women, one of them married to the founder of the Yaddo Writer’s Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where I took the journalism job I thought would help me break the glass ceiling. At Wiawaka, a room is devoted to O’Keeffe’s early paintings and sketches. Wiawaka was founded so that the ordinary middle-class woman could take an affordable vacation from her life and come write.
Lake George, Autumn, 1927, Georgia O’Keeffe
This connection to O’Keeffe made me ask a question: Could there be a Georgia O’Keeffe painting that had the horizon I wanted for the cover of Boundless?
It took two Google seconds to answer the question. Yes, and it was a painting of Lake George. Yes, and the sunset unfolded in a sense of endless becoming. Yes, and it said: This is a woman’s story. A mother’s story.
Lake George, Reflection, Georgia O’Keeffe
Only just one problem, and you can imagine what it is: I needed permission.
It was worth asking—I’m a woman writer, I’m from New Mexico, I’m writing about a woman artist finding autonomy. Yes, her people said, we see that, but we are only saying yes to books that are centered on her life and her work.
Also did I mention that the painting is valued at $13 million?
So, back to the design board.
What Brazil did
Once I signed my book deal, I was thrilled to learn my cover designer was from Brazil. Because of my design career, I knew the bold, innovative design that comes out of the place. I would say, early and often, “My designer is from Brazil.” I wouldn’t say, my editor is from Chicago, my managing editor is from Texas, my publicist is from Michigan. But I would always say where Ronaldo Alves was from.
What “Brazil” did was come up with six excellent covers for the first round. We quickly narrowed it to three. I asked for variations. In a short amount of time, because we spoke the same language, we had three finalists.
I would test-drive them at the San Diego Writer’s Festival, where I was promoting my book and my writing retreats in a booth with author-client Diana Silva, whose Mole Mama novel, Abuelita’s Magical Molcajete proved to be irresistible. That, and we adorned the booth with papel picado banners and offered cupcakes all day long!
Our booth at the San Diego Writer’s Festival, April 2024
I asked people to vote on one of three covers, and that gave me a chance to polish my quick-pitch all day long. One cover was a clear winner in the voting.
Voting on the cover options for Boundless at the San Diego Writer’s Festival, April 2024
But still…
It’s a tragicomedy
This isn’t a book of quiet reflection. I do not face the empty nest gracefully. Instead, I experience a colossal failure of the imagination as to what my life will be next. I have my “losing it” empty-nest moment in the badlands of Glen Canyon, when, one week after graduating high school, the twins nearly die in a car accident.
I scream until my throat is raw. Glen Canyon is huge enough
and bleak enough and sad enough that it can hold my screams.
Excerpt from BOUNDLESS
Then there is my take on the dying newspaper industry and the imbecility of managing the decline. (Yes, imbecility is a word, and the English language needed it, if only to describe the “rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic” that has been the print journalism business since 2007). Thus, I cannot resist a rant on democracy and journalistic integrity. I’ve been told my narration of print journalism in a death spiral is “relentless.”
Relentless, and not without comic touches.
In another scene, after being summarily fired, I try a Welcoming Prayer meditation to move through what the wisdom teachers call “the afflictive experience.” I’m no good at it, though I’ve written a book on meditation and studied contemplation through Father Richard Rohr’s Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Instead, I book it to Irish acoustic jam night at Saratoga Inn.
I am not a paragon of calm.
A detour: The Yellow Brick Road
So, I needed a cover that had an edge. Something less abstract. Something with a narrative—something that suggested things are off kilter and despite all my best attempts to keep all the plates spinning, it’s not going well for me. Mistakes are being made. Tornadoes are touching down…
And then one day I looked up from my writing desk and there was the image on my own wall: New Mexico artist Amy M. Ditto’s take on Dorothy after Oz. In the image, Dorothy has kicked off her ruby slippers and stepped off the Yellow Brick Road. Her posture is eager, curious, adventurous. Perfect for a story about regaining your emotional agility. It helped that her Dorothy had long auburn hair like mine.
“Kinda perfect!” said an author friend when I texted the image to him.
At the risk of living the Oz cliche, I may have had the answer all along.
Let the foraging begin: The AI world and the actual habitats of real books
But the artist never responded to my request to talk about permissions, and that sent us (mostly my friend—he’s pretty good at this!) down the AI image creation rabbit hole, hoping to find something that my book designer in Brazil could replicate. Let me just say here that AI has a sense of humor.
My friend and I took our question out into the wild. We had been foraging the front table displays at bookstores for weeks, hoping that if we surveyed the habitat, we would have better ideas about what stood out. The premise was that if a book that someone—many someones—had made a great effort to support had gotten its way here on a table with the most recommended books, could Boundless get here?
That made us play with our own inner sense of recognition. What book covers looked tired and trite, already slouching toward the back table? What book covers had marginalized themselves already? What book covers looked bold—broke new ground? Who was on the leading edge?
The book covers that stood out were simple and clear. Which is where I started in the first place. Maybe I did have the answer all along.
Ultimately, the question would turn on who this book was for. It is for the becomers. This is a book for those who are still becoming—only they have no map for it. Read this book if the women and men you know feel lost and confused about creating a Chapter Two adulthood. Read this book if you are still becoming—if like Michelle Obama, you do not see growing up as finite. As she writes, “Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”
Books are the meetup point. Books are where we begin larger conversations because they start from the place of what means most to us. Hello, have you met my book?
KEY LINKS
* The reference to *tiny but frightening requests” comes from David Whyte’s poem “Sometimes”. Read Maria Popova’s (Brain Pickings/The Marginalian) take on this poem here.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/08/19/david-whyte-sometimes/
Read David Whyte’s Substack on “Sometimes,” where he says that “sometimes you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you.”
Does design matter? If you say yes, then listen to Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast here: The world's first podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture through wide-ranging conversations with designers, writers, artists, curators, musicians, and other luminaries of contemporary thought
https://www.designmattersmedia.com/
A few other Substack authors have written about the story of their cover design.
Read more here:
Sara Petersen discussed the cover design process with her readers.
Congratulations, Carolyn! Seeing the cover is always a thrill. best off luck with the book and all that follows.
Gorgeous!