Judge a Book by Its Cover, Please!
“I looooove the cover!” a considering reader says as she picks up and thumbs through my latest book.
“Me, too,” I tell her. “The story that birthed it is every bit as good.”
Then with eyes that hold the door agape, she invites me to go on.
“The original options given to me for the cover were extremely literal,” I explain. “When I opened the file of cartoonish compost piles in all their garbage glory, my heart sank. It wasn’t at all what I had in mind.”
I envisioned something abstract. A cover that reflected what the words inside could do. But I didn’t know how to explain what I saw inside my head--much less create it. I only knew I’d know it when I saw it. And this absolutely was not it.
So I called my friend to vent.
He listened--ever so patiently--then said, because he heard both what I did and didn’t say, “I might have a painting by a local Los Angeles artist I would like for you to see.”
His wife, Yvonne, was a painter. She was also an actress, a singer, a dancer—a performer. A creative who could never find enough outlets for her bevy of gifts. When she passed, her close friend, DeeDee, (a creative in her own right) proclaimed that she would like to learn to paint like “Y.” So, my friend boxed up all of Yvonne’s art supplies and took them to her.
And DeeDee began to paint. One of her creations depicted transformation.
I then tap the cover with my index finger and tell the curious listener, “This is it.”
The potential reader picks up the book and clutches it two-handed to her heart.
Suddenly, the stranger thinking about reading, the artist whom I’ve never met, my friend plus the uber-talented love of his life, and me are all wound up like a ball of yarn. We don’t know each other, yet we do.
Confluence astounds.
Every time I do a reading, everywhere I sign and sell, when I tell the story of the cover, the reaction is the same: The Compost File gets two-hand hugged with crossed arms to the chest. If you look closely at the cover, you’ll see the opening of the artwork forms a heart.
Connection is a craving we find difficult to resist.
DeeDee’s original painting is more boisterous, a bit more volatile with bolder colors. It bubbles, like an uprising, to a lighter, freer top, though an even-handed evolution was not necessarily what she intended. She says it didn’t start out anywhere near how it ended up.
Things almost never do.
Occasionally, they reach farther than we ever would have dreamed.