Seeking cover

I mean there are so many puns to make with "cover," it's hard to choose. Barnes and Noble goes with "Cover Stories," which is clever. Most accurate would have been "Choosing Cover," but that works less well. With Atlas, I could have gone with "Under Cover." In fact, more about Atlas covers in another blog post soon -- some pretty good stories there. 

Meantime, here's the piece I wrote for B&N about the Goodbye For Now covers in the US and UK. Can't wait to see the other 25 or so that are coming from lovely, hardworking, leap-of-faith-taking publishers around the world. I feel very lucky to be two for two so far -- I adore both of these covers. Which do you prefer? 

US Cover...you know, in case you haven't seen it elsewhere.

UK cover...in case you aren't in London right now. Poor you. And me.

​Or what might you have done instead were you designing the cover for this book? I've been getting some emails from readers who admit to puzzling over the cover in the store -- they read the flap; they look at the cover; they don't get the connection until they read the book. I get that. Do you want covers to broadcast the...theme? Point? Setting? Surface plot? Hint at the twist? Portray the characters? Convey the mood? Throw you off track? Simply intrigue? Or just be pretty?

Or do you not give a crap about the cover at all? Especially now that such a large percentage of people only ever see the thing as a 1x1 inch jpeg on Amazon, is all the effort and angst and expense wasted on book covers? Can you imagine books without them? When paper books more or less become a thing of the past? What need we of covers if we have nothing -- no thing -- to, you know, cover?