I’ll admit it. When I first shared my “book cover design” experience here on the newsletter a few months ago (scroll through that post), there were details I left out. Gory, haunting details. Like self-inflicted amnesia, I just wanted to pretend the worst plot points in that relentless cover design saga didn’t happen at all because the truth is that they reflected well on absolutely no one involved, especially me.
I confess to having put a great deal of pressure on myself and the Simon & Schuster design team to come up with a cover that not only matched the aesthetic of Cultish, but exceeded it. We got there in the end, but I think my intensity was partially to blame for everything that happened up until that final point. True to the brand, I was overthinking the cover to a self-sabotaging degree, failing to trust the process, and this resulted in about a four-month period when I was genuinely panicked that a decent cover was not in my future.
You may recall that before S&S’s lead designer Jimmy suggested a “fingers crossed” gesture as the central concept (and bless him for cracking that nut), I was keen on incorporating a futuristic bust image into the cover. The book’s themes deal in juxtapositions of the past and future, and I wanted to represent that by taking the image of a classic Greek statue and recasting it in a smooth robot-esque texture with dreamy, abstract designs pouring out of the head. It’s a lot of vision, I know lol. I was going for maximalism! But the concept was too hard to translate. There was one point when we all got so far off track that I momentarily lost all hope.
What I failed to share in that original book cover drama post was this one round of cover designs that was so monstrously wrong, so horrendously non-viable, that I considered fashioning a homemade guillotine and executing myself. Scroll at your own risk.