Cover Your Bases

The not-so-simple job of making a picture book cover

The cover of a picture book, much like a comic book, really can help sell a book. I’ve always tried to make the covers of my books as appealing and simple as possible. There is something about simplicity that I find appealing. Maybe it’s because of my initial influence of Peanuts. I don’t know.

If you look back at my previous covers, I wanted images that looked different from other picture books and ones that would grab the eye.

So, I figured some people might like a behind-the-scenes tour of the making of the cover to my latest book, The Imaginoodles.

As with every book, it starts out with design sketches I send off to my wonderful editor, Lauri, and the talented designer, Jason. In these, again, I wanted to try something different.

Each of them was a moment from the book, but with all my previous cover being heavily white, I want to change it up and have a largely black cover. I also wanted the title really large and be a focal point. We all agreed on the first cover but maybe not with a black background, so I worked it up. That included doing the title myself, as I’ve done in the past.

Based on the idea of imagination, I wanted a very different kind of logo.

And, then I did up the cover itself. It’s a point in the story where a giant squid attacks our band of Imaginoodles. And this is how it turned out.

We also thought it would be cool if the tentacles extended to the back cover, so I did this.

And then we all felt like it wasn’t right. Jason suggested a couple things. More of a focus on the characters and a more simplified logo. He grabbed a couple of images from the interiors, put them together to indicate what he was thinking and I took that prompt and did a revised sketch.

It seemed to work. So, I finished up that idea and we got what is now the cover of the book.

The thing I’ve discovered after doing this a while is don’t just settle on your first idea. Picture books may seem simple, but it’s a lot of work to make things look simple.

I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of THE IMAGINOODLES for the little ones in your life!