Behind the Cover of GILDED

Today I am thrilled to be sharing with you the cover of GILDED over at YA Book Central. I hope you all will stop by to see the cover, watch my video, and say hello, especially since my publisher is kindly giving away a Kindle Paperwhite. YAY!!!

Before going through this whole publishing-a-book-process, I never understood how much goes into a book before it’s ‘born’. I did a vlog about it here where I talk about this in more depth.

Today I thought I’d run through the process of behind the scenes of the making of GILDED’s cover. It’s important to remember that everyone’s process is different. Some books will have a similar process to mine, while others will be completely different.

Phase 1- Author Questionnaire

My editor had me fill out a author questionnaire form. In this form there was a section about my thoughts or ideas for the cover for GILDED. The thing is, I’m not an artist. I’m more of a stick drawer (and a bad one at that). But I do know what I like or don’t like. So I made a Pinterest page of covers I loved and then another Pinterest page of images and symbols that I thought represented GILDED.

Phase 2- Concepts from the Author

My editor asked for any other thoughts that I wanted to forward to Katrina Damkoehler, the cover designer, before she got started. I gave her some more ideas, and Katrina got to work.

Phase 3- Freaking Out

This was where I hadn’t seen anything yet and I worried, and freaked out, and then crossed my fingers that I’d have a good cover. It’s pretty common for authors to not like their covers or think their cover ‘fits’ their idea of the book.

Phase 4- First Cover Concepts

Once Katrina was finished, my editor sent me the first outlines for the cover. Katrina had three rough sketches for me to look at. My agent and I were able to bring our feedback to these concepts. The biggest issue that we had was making sure the cover was accurate and represented Korea and the story correctly. My editor hired Cliff Nielson to do the artwork for the mythological bird on the cover. When she first emailed me to let me know that they hired him, I nearly had a heart attack.

 

Phase 5- Revised Comps

This was where everything started coming together. Changes were made and we got nitpicky. Do we like that font color? Is the bird too big, too small?

Phase 6- Final Comps and Jacket Copy

It was done! All the elements were in place. In this phase, I got to see what the spine, inside flaps and back of the book looked like. Let me tell you, even though I went through the whole process of watching this cover come into making, my heart still nearly stopped when I saw the final. It came out better than I could have imagined and I’m so thrilled to have this as my cover.

And my sister and I just might have a phone with GILDED’s cover on it…

After teaching and traveling internationally, Christina Farley started writing about her adventures, tossing in a little fiction for fun. This inspired her to write GILDED, a YA about a Korean-American girl with a black belt and deadly proclivity with steel-tipped arrows to be published by Skyscape (Amazon Children’s) March 1, 2014. Besides writing, Christina loves traveling, running, hanging out with her two Jedi warriors, and eating dark chocolate.