Blog Stop Today: The Importance of Book Covers

The Bootylicious high-speed virtual tour is all the way across the globe today, where I'm guest blogging on the importance of book covers over at Suzanne Kamata's terrific blog Gaijin Mama (an American writer living in Japan).

Here's a portion of my post:

As booksellers will tell you, readers DO judge a book by its cover. Or, ahem, “dust jacket”—to use the formal term. So… should an author get involved with cover art? Only if she wants to. If you happen to have some passages or some images that you feel drawn to, or that you feel inspired your work, by all means share it!
For example, the cover for my first novel, THE GARDEN ANGEL, went through several different versions. Continue Reading>>>

By the way, Suzanne is a writer and editor--who, before she made her home in Japan, once lived in the Palmetto State--and I interviewed her last year to help get word out about her books, Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press) and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press). I've included that author-to-author interview from last year with Suzanne, here:

After graduating from the University of South Carolina in 1988, Suzanne Kamata was eager to leave the country, to “experience a non-Western culture.” To git, as we say around these parts. She applied to the Peace Corps and was assigned to Cameroon, but, on a lark, decided to head to Japan after being offered a one-year assistant teaching position with Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET), a program her brother had read about in the newspaper. “I figure I'd spend a year in Japan and then go to Africa,” she said. “But one year in Japan didn't seem like enough - there was still so much to see and do and learn.” Kamata decided to renew her contract for one more year.
She’s been there ever since.
Two decades later, Kamata makes her home in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan with her husband, Yukiyoshi Kamata, and their nine-year-old twins. She teaches part-time and writes in her “pockets of free time” when her children are in school. A productive writer, Kamata’s work has appeared in over 100 publications. She is fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama and the author of the novel Losing Kei. She has edited two anthologies: The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and the Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.
“I think mothers all over the world have a hard time finding time to write,” she said. “Much to the dismay of the other mothers [at her daughter’s school], I would often sneak off to a cafe or to the school library for an hour or so to read and write. I wrote my novel and edited Love You to Pieces that way.”
Kamata’s twins were born prematurely, and her daughter has cerebral palsy and is deaf. “I realized, when she was diagnosed that I had no idea how to raise such a child. As a literary sort of person, I first went to books to try to figure out what was going to happen and to try to find solace.” The result is Love you to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, an anthology Kamata edited about raising children with special needs. The collection includes short stories, essays, and poems by renowned authors (such as Brett Lott) as well as emerging writers about families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. “The best novels, short stories, and memoirs can pull in the lives of their characters and provide a deeper understanding of others,” Kamata said, adding she hoped the book “will serve as a kind of support group in far-flung places…”
Raising children outside her native culture is “bittersweet,” Kamata said. “'I’m happy that my son is bilingual and that my children have been exposed to various cultures. And I'm glad that they have a close relationship with their Japanese relatives.” On the other hand, she misses sharing “simple things like running through the sprinkler in the middle of summer,” or going trick-or-treating. “But these conflicts give me something to explore in my writing,” she said. “ As a reader, I tend to be drawn to multicultural stories, though I also read a lot of fiction set in South Carolina, especially when I'm feeling nostalgic.”
Kamata’s novel Losing Kei, tells the story of a young South Carolina painter who, as an American expat, loses custody of her only son to her Japanese ex-husband and then resorts to desperate measures to get him back. “When I write nonfiction, I feel naked. When I write fiction, I feel like I'm wearing a dress --or maybe a flimsy negligee! But seriously, I like being able to move events around and make sense of them—something that happens more in fiction.” Losing Kei is Kamata’s first published novel—she’s written five—and said she’s excited about working with Leapfrog Press, publisher of Losing Kie, to plan a stateside booktour.
When Kamata arrives in South Carolina this month, she plans to visit family, catch up with friends, and sign copies of her novel.
And maybe run through the sprinkler.

These boots were made for planting

When I hit the road for a book tour in a couple of weeks, I'll be bringing along a LOT of footware. But not to wear. These are boots. Discarded ones. Some pilfered. All stuffed with sumptuous succulents and posies.

The friends, loved ones, and strangers unaware they've donated to the booty cause will surely be charmed by the results. I'm still collecting boots and gathering up plants. I'll be giving some bootylicious planters away at readings and signings-- while supplies last. Hope to see you there.

Addendum: I've already written about the cover of SECRET KEEPERS--those boots are on my front porch. I keep getting asked--but WHOSE boots are they? Well, one of them is a husband's and one belongs to some dude from the 80's. I think. But that sounds like an entirely new novel.

The Bootylicious Cover Story of Secret Keepers

My publisher has been terrific about soliciting my ideas for the book jacket of Secret Keepers.

Originally, I shared some images I had in mind: vintage seed catalogs, seed packets, outsider garden art.

The first cover idea looked like this:
Charming, lovely, and "iconic," as a friend of mine said. But after an informal poll among some friends and artists familiar with my novel, the thinking was that this cover might be a tad old-fashioned for the story. True, there is much about the past and its intrusion into one family's present-day conflicts, but there is also a range of characters in SECRET KEEPERS-- feisty widows, a love-sick landscaper, a wayward teen, a women trapped in shopping addiction and a loveless marriage, a homeless, gifted plantsman--characters who aren't...dainty. Characters eventually brought together by the mysterious plants from a forsaken, forgotten garden.




I was asked to send in more ideas, and I shared a range of website links [rusty lawn chairs, vine-covered iron gates, etc.] and a few photos from my own garden that I thought might illustrate a sort of ruined finery, weed-swallowed-but-rescued theme. What a cool surprise to see a photo I took used on the cover. As I write this, those succulent-filled boots are on my front porch.