Greetings! My name is
Jesse Miller and I am the author of two novels, both available from Common Deer
Press. If you’re like me, you’ve been
nearly bludgeoned to death by the old adage to avoid judging a book by its
cover. However, it’s pretty hard not
to—it’s the first thing that catches our eye and it makes an impression long
before we dip into the actual-factual content of the book. This is to say, much like an album (back when
albums were regarded as an important unit of art!), the cover transmits something
artistically important (and immediately) to a reader. The cover matters, and it most certainly
matters to the writer as well.
Today then,
I’d like to share what could be thought of as concept art—sketches, iterations—in
the evolution of the book art for my two novels.
I’d like
to present EXHIBIT A! This is the first
idea I had for my novel Unwrap Your Candy. For this to make sense, a little about the
book from our fine friends at the publicity department at Common Deer Press:
Thom’s life has a soundtrack.
Unseen glass phalluses—thousands of them—whirring softly along conveyer belts
on the other side of the factory wall. The snap and splash of eggs against
plaster. The scratch-fizz-tang of cigarette lighters being flipped again and
again. A thousand throats swallowing a thousand swigs of beer; a thousand sets
of lungs choking on a thousand French inhales. Hard fists sinking into soft
flesh; soft chunks dropping onto hard sidewalks. Plop-flush-drain repeat. And
moonsong, high above, forever calling and calling, “Stud, rub 'er with the Stud
Rubber.” If only it were so simple.
Got it? Our protag Thom works in a condom factory and
boy howdy does it drive him to snap!
Now, check out the original idea I had for the cover. Notice the condom
there front-and-center—I was thinking, like, it needs to be a bunch of condoms
from a box, connected; and notice the lettering of the brand kind of melting
into the presentation of the title and the author of the novel (that’s me!):
And then
check out the full cover, jacket I think is the term—it had to be a dance party
of sorts, the movement of the language of the book, and I was thinking, well, I
was thinking this needs to just get buckwild, so I want phalluses parading
around is the thing, which is…uh…quite something to behold:
Ellie,
the undisputed book art champion of the world, came back with this breathtaking
cover below. I mean, it makes my pupils
dilate and gives me the same kind of feeling as the chromatic trinity of a
White Stripes album cover. Check it:
Next,
the full wrapper. Whatever cool new saying
is synonymous with “mic drop,” please apply that here:
Ok, now
for the book I’m currently promoting. Like
UYC, it’s important to have a little
sense of the book’s content before we, I guess, judge the cover by the book?? So, here is more fine work from the publicity
department at Common Deer Press about my current novel ARK:
Imagine the son of Cinderella and
Noah. That's Alabaster Ash, professional window washer and amateur foot
fetishist, thrall to his three physically fit, brutally aggressive stepsisters.
After polishing foot after foot of glass in the gingerbread city of Candyland
and cleaning up after the “wicked stairmasters,” he haunts the bars and streets
looking for love and appreciation–or a really nice pair of feet. Like it or
not, Alabaster finds himself reliving and reimagining his parents' lives as he
roams from bar to bar, from thrill ride to stunt show in the linguistic funland
that is ARK.
As I was
working on ARK, I kept imagining two
covers, and at some point when I finally found a publisher, I presented each
idea for approval. Idea one had a decidedly
conceptual rock album feel:
While
idea one captures the big-ticket artifacts from the stories shaping my novel,
idea two distills the soul of the story
a bit more I think, and there’s a playfulness, a punning—the no signal blackout
tv screen concept. It gets at the hope-inspiring
rainbow from old Noah, but it fractures and reassembles it within the framework
of a blackout drunk befitting our bumbling protagonist Alabaster:
Now for a
wrinkle: Like so many starter marriages these days, ARK was involved with a prior publisher, and this was the cover for
the first release. I loved it when it
came out, and even though I lost my mind and went catatonic for a while after
the original publisher folded, I still have a great fondness for this ALL CAPS!
bold cover:
Thankfully,
after the release of UYC, the fine
people at Common Deer Press took an interest in ARK. And now the book lives
on, maybe even reaching a wider and more interested audience (YOU could BE that audience!!) And I have come to think of the new cover as
just about the most astoundingly perfect artwork for the book—this is a fully
realized form, Jack. Most things are
really, truly terrible, but this fills me with what I can only describe as pure
joy. I love you Common Deer Press, and
I’m so very freaking thrilled to share the artwork for my sorta-kinda-new novel:
Goddamn,
that’s beautiful. And then the full
wrap:
And now
for you! You like things, I’m sure of
it! So, all of this casting back in time
and deep meditation on artwork has me thinking about some of my favorite iconic
art from other (more famous) literary works.
So, what’s your favorite book cover and why?
ARK
Jesse Miller
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Common Deer Press
Date of Publication: May 15, 2018
ISBN: Hardcover ISBN: 978-988761-08-4
Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-988761-07-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-988761-09-1
Number of pages: 162
Word Count: 45k
Cover Artist: Ellie Sipila
Book Description:
Imagine the son of Cinderella and Noah. That's Alabaster Ash, professional window washer and amateur foot fetishist, thrall to his three physically fit, brutally aggressive stepsisters.
After polishing foot after foot of glass in the gingerbread city of Candyland and cleaning up after the “wicked stairmasters,” he haunts the bars and streets looking for love and appreciation -or a really nice pair of feet.
Like it or not, Alabaster finds himself reliving and reimagining his parents' lives as he roams from bar to bar, from thrill ride to stunt show in the linguistic funland that is ARK.
Excerpt:
Ground squirmed
past the windows, shuffling racks of bones and skulls under the soptoil as
clouds crept along the horizon. On the bus, all the windows let in cold air and
hung like a racked row of ice cubes in a tray, but I barely cracked the bottle.
Out I poured
when the doors opened, unable to feel my legs, unable to see the ocean, but I
could smell the salty marsh marching wet blue harridans, swiping and batting
the spit, pushing the blood and saltboxing up fatjuices into my sinuses.
Jammed a kwata
in the belly box and engaged the line.
–Hello?
–I’ve arrived.
I’m here.
–That’s great. I
bet a little walk will feel like a little slice of heaven, eh?
–I suppose.
–Well, I’ll
leave the light on for you, Buddy.
I slid on my
gloves and tried not to flinch at the sudden mustering of prickly discs
skipping to my face. I leaned in hard and clacked through town, blackened and
boarded and unblinking, barely wicklit. Smatter rooms to let. Ingrown hairs.
Offseason. Unseasoned in the savorless in and out drag of the tonguetide. I
dashed through a carless parking lot and into an astralamped glass meadow
jotting down quivering blue starlight ink- puddles into suckshifts of
snowhunchbanks humpbacking the outermost stretch of tideland. To the left, a
skit of cloven unguals stirred it seemed, crunchy, but I only got half an ear
worth and couldn’t noctoscop the goings-on of could be caribou or elk or deer
bowing their head, bowing their head before the almighty peering down hard and
in, like the retractable Polton and Crane lamp in the dentist’s office that
hangs my mouth open.
Inside the
blackness, the stickiting, ricketing pickets of thickets wiggle on their dicot
studs without me seeing, while they shot out the other side and stitched a
black curtain against the edge of the rest of the world. I clacked another mile
stretch as brine wafers tickled my ears and swizzled my nos- trils while
Lawrence Welk drift popping jollyjawdropping orbs uncorked across my field of
vichy.
Estrella’s was a
lighthouse, though not the vertical variety. But it glowed.
Light hung out
over the glass and flabbed fat, hotwhite dough out the sides as I took up her
street. This was another gingerbread house, hundreds of miles from home, though
this one in earshot of the beach. I rang and rang and rang and then just opened
the door.
About the Author:
Jesse Miller is the author of Unwrap Your Candy and the forthcoming ARK, both available from Common Deer Press. He is a Visiting Assistant Lecturer in English at the University of New England. He lives in the great city of Portland, Maine with his wife, two cats, and dog. Jesse roots for the Red Sox.
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