How To Give Feedback On Your Cover With Nicole Maggi

I love talking to authors. Our experiences are so similar, yet so very different, that every one of us has a new story to share. Everyone says that the moment you get your cover it really hits you - you're an author. The cover is your story - and you - packaged for the world. So the process of the cover reveal can be slightly panic inducing. Does it fit your story? Is it what you hoped? Will it sell? With this in mind I put together the CRAP (Cover Reveal Anxiety Phase) Interview.

Today's guest for the CRAP is Nicole Maggi, author of The Twin Willows trilogy, The Forgetting and What They Don't Know.

Did you have any pre-conceived notions about what you wanted your cover to look like?

I’m not really a visual person, so I really didn’t. I was at first thinking along the lines of a bold graphic design, but in discussions with my editor I found out that for trade paperback originals (which this book will be) photographic covers sell better. Who knew? These are the kinds of things that authors just don’t really know about. Once I learned that I was on board with having a photographic layout for the design.

How far in advance from your pub date did you start talking covers with your house?

The book was originally set to release in Summer 2018, and I was shown a preliminary cover at the end of September. But unfortunately that cover just wasn’t right for the book. Due to many factors (the cover being one of them) the book was pushed back to October 2nd, and we finalized the cover in March. So there was a pretty long period of five months where we worked on getting the cover just right – definitely longer than any other book cover experience I’ve had.

Did you have any input on your cover?

I did. My contract grants me “cover consultation” so my publisher was in no way obligated to listen to my input, but they did, and I’m very grateful to them. When the initial cover was revealed to me, I just had a gut feeling that it sent the wrong message about the book. Together with my agent we discussed with the publisher why it wasn’t right. They listened and came back some weeks later with a complete redesign. From there it was a matter of fine-tuning things like font, tagline placement, color…all the little things that you don’t really think about when you first look at a cover, but when it’s your cover, and you’ve been staring at it for weeks, you become obsessed with. Haha! My publisher took all of my input into account, and I’m very happy with what we landed on.

How was your cover revealed to you?

By my editor, via email. That’s how I’ve always seen my covers. I love that scene in that Sex & The City episode where Carrie actually has a meeting with her editor and publisher in their office and they show her a poster-board mock-up of her book cover. That never happens!

Was there an official "cover reveal" date for your art?

Yes, there was, though I set it up myself. I’ve done both, where the publisher sets it up and where I’ve set it up, and this time we decided to have me set it up with a Booktuber I know well, Caden Sage of A Thousand Books To Read. She revealed it on Instagram on April 7th.

How far in advance of the reveal date were you aware of what your cover would look like?

Probably about a month. I received the final full cover layout for the Advanced Reader Copy of the book, and then once we had the reveal set up I was sent a high-res photo of the cover.

Was it hard to keep it to yourself before the official release?

Not really…also I’d been showing a lot of people on my phone for weeks what it was going to look like so I guess I spoiled the surprise anyway, hahaha!

What surprised you most about the process?

Honestly, I think I was most surprised by how receptive my publisher was to my ideas. I’d heard a lot of horror stories about other authors with other publishers just being steamrolled over on their covers, and I was scared that would happen when I pushed back on the initial cover design. I’m very grateful to the Sourcebooks team for listening and taking into account my thoughts and ideas. I think the design team did a wonderful job capturing the tone of the book, and there are some details on the cover that I just love, like the pages falling out of Mellie’s journal, and the handwritten DON’T to reflect the journal-entry format of the book.

Any advice to other debut authors about how to handle cover art anxiety?

Keep calm and use your voice. If you don’t like your cover, speak up immediately, and get your agent involved right away. List real, concrete and reasonable reasons why it’s the wrong cover; just saying “I don’t like it” isn’t enough. Back up your argument, and do it strongly but diplomatically. And once it’s done, celebrate it! Your beautiful book has a cover! That’s a BIG step. Take a deep breath and enjoy it.

How A Metal Rod Through the Brain Is Inspiring

Authors never know what's going to lead to a novel. A dream. Something we see from the corner of our eye. A random question, or an overheard conversation in a coffee shop. Or... in the case of A Madness So Discreet, a story about someone's front lobe being punctured by a tamping iron.

I'm fascinated by the human brain. Deeply, deeply fascinated. Our understanding of the rest of our bodies is pretty thorough, but the organ that makes us US, that commands our speech and movement, our personalities and intelligence we're still drawing a pretty big blank on. Yes, we're learning. We're mapping our brains and using the technology at our fingertips to make strides, but one of the larger steps toward knowing more about our brains came in 1848.

Phineas Gage was a railroad worker whose job involved setting blasts to make way through rock for the new lines. He used a tamping iron - a metal rod three feet long - to tamp charges down before igniting them. On September 13, 1848 someone messed up. A hole had been bored into the rock, the powder had gone in, and (Gage thought) so had the sand that his tamping iron packs. But the sand wasn't there, and when Gage struck the gunpowder it ignited, sending his tamping iron through his skull. It entered below his left eye socket and exited through the top of his head.

Yep, that's gross.

Gage is famous not because he had a tamping iron blown through his head. He's famous because he lived even though part of his frontal lobe exited along with the tamping iron. Gage not only lived, but was walking and speaking right after the accident. His workmen carted him to the town doctor, to whom he supposedly said, "Here's work enough for you, doctor."

Yes, he even had a sense of humor about it all.

But, not for long. Though Gage lived through the accident, his personality showed damage long after the physical healing was finished. Gage had been a hard worker, an intelligent foreman and a pleasant person. Post-accident Gage was a shadow of his former self. The doctor who treated him initially, Dr. John Martin, followed Gage's progress with interest and documented the personality change:

The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was 'no longer Gage.'

While Phineas' accident was life-changing in a bad way, it led to tremendous gains in the emerging science of neurology. Scientists were just beginning to understand that different areas of the brain served different purposes, and while they didn't quite grasp how this worked (enjoy this amusing early phrenology chart), Gage's trauma taught them that the frontal cortex was heavily involved in personality and social reasoning.

Gage died during an epileptic fit thirteen years after the tamping rod accident. His skull and tamping iron are in the Harvard University School of Medicine, if you want to go see them.

Gage's story is both sad and amazing, one that's always captured my attention. That a iron rod can pass through the human brain and that brain continue to function might sound like fiction, but it's not.

It's just science.

Reading about Phineas Gage got me interested in brain science, which led me to reading about lobotomies, which led me to reading about treatment of the insane, which led me to learning more about The Athens Lunatic Asylum, where A Madness So Discreet is set.

An amalgamation of different ideas and subjects came together to create A Madness So Discreet, but Phineas Gage ignited that spark.

Please tell me you get the joke (and forgive me, Phineas).

I like Phineas so much, I consider him my historical boyfriend. Watch the video to learn why.

Melanie Hooyenga On Creative Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Melanie Hooyenga whose time travel series, The Flicker Effect, tells the story of Biz, a 17-year old who uses sunlight to travel back to yesterday, and her sports romance series, The Rules, follows three teens as they navigate love and sports.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My latest release, The Trail Rules, is the second in a series about girls in Colorado trying to figure out life while spending every free minute skiing, mountain biking, and snowboarding. The idea for the series was sparked during the 2014 Olympics. We were buried under 100+ inches of snow and I decided it’d be fun to write about a girl who was not only a skier, but a freestyle skier—meaning she does tricks and flips that I could only dream of attempting. The second book takes place in late summer/early fall, and since a lot of skiers and snowboarders mountain bike in the off-season, that’s what my main character does. The main character in book three, which comes out October 2018, is about a skier who’s learning to snowboard.

My earlier series, The Flicker Effect, came to me in lightning bolt fashion. It’s about a girl who uses sunlight to go back to yesterday, and it was sparked by the sun flickering through the trees while I was driving. Out of nowhere the idea popped into my head: What if there’s a girl who, when the light does this, she goes back to yesterday? And a trilogy was born.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

The Trail Rules is a companion novel to The Slope Rules, so while readers have already met my main character Mike (Mikayla), I wanted to dive into what makes her hopes for the future and what makes her happy. At the end of book one, life has come together for her and she thinks she has everything she wants (spoiler: she doesn’t), so I had to figure out what would have to change to make her question her decisions.

I knew her boyfriend would teach her how to mountain bike, and from there I decided to introduce a new group of friends who would encourage her to be her true self. There was a lot of school drama in book one around Mike’s former BFF, so that continues (and leads into book three), plus her parents are cracking down for her to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Funny you should ask, because that happened with The Trail Rules. I’ve always been an outliner, but I keep things pretty loose to allow myself and my characters the freedom to explore the story. But Mike totally threw me for a loop when (minor spoiler) she fell for the boy who was just supposed to be a distraction. I had to rewrite the outline for the second half of the book to allow the new relationship to grow. The plot-based parts of the story didn’t change much, but having to switch gears on the love interest definitely surprised me!

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

In the past, I really struggled with ideas. I need to know how a story ends before I can start writing, so unless I could see my way to The End in the notes phase, I didn’t consider it an Official Idea. My first published book, Flicker, was the first in a series, so I had the next couple books all plotted out. I got the idea for The Slope Rules when I was starting Faded, so I dove right into that next. This is really the first time I get to choose my own adventure.

As I’ve written more, I’ve learned to let my mind wander to tickle out ideas. I have a background in advertising and marketing, so I love brainstorming and seeing where a seemingly crazy idea can lead.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

This is a very timely question, because I’m struggling with this right now. I have two very different ideas for novels—one’s a light-hearted road-trip New Adult and the other is a darker, more psychological thriller YA—and every time I talk about them, I change my mind on which I want to write next. I finally settled on the darker one, which will be perfect since the days are getting shorter and I love writing when it’s dark and gloomy out.

I have 8 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

YES. My miniature schnauzer Owen, who, by the way, is way more popular on Instagram than I am. Depending on where I’m writing, he’ll snuggle against my side or at my feet, but most of the time he sleeps on what I call his princess pillow (a weird leopard-print pillow from my single days that he’s adopted as his own) next to my writing chair in my office. He’s excellent at sounding out plot points and never judges me when I laugh at my own jokes.

As for human writing buddies, I don’t have a regular routine of writing with others but I do have lovely critique partners. For NaNoWriMo, I typically go to at least one write in and I find a room full of clacking keyboards inspiring, but for the most part I write alone.