Getting the Cover Just Right

By the author, Jim Doti


The image featured above is the earliest sketch that Lisa gave me for the cover of our book.  But as I looked at all of her initial sketches for our book, there was another one—showing Jimmy on stage with his hand thrust upward—that I thought would make a great cover.    When I suggested the idea to Lisa, she felt strongly that placing this illustration on the cover would give away too much about the plot.  After all, she reminded me, “that’s the ‘aha’ moment when Jimmy truly finds his voice.  It would be wrong to telegraph that dramatic scene on the cover of the book.”  Needless to say, I found Lisa’s argument convincing.

So the next step was for Lisa to use the above pencil sketch as the basis for her painted illustration shown below:

Really cute!  But a problem with this latest is that it’s not clear that the elf is on stage.  That begs the question:  “What does an elf have to do with
An Adventure on Stage
?”  As a result, I asked Lisa to add curtains and an audience to show more clearly that Jimmy the elf is on stage.

As Lisa described in her May 30 post “Speaking of Drawing Boards,” she used PhotoShop to make these changes to her original painting.  We then added the title and other elements to complete a draft cover design:

I loved it… except for one thing.  Regular readers of this blog will know that the title has been the most significant hurdle we’ve faced with this book.   As I wrote in “Revisiting the Title Redux” (May 18), I hoped the matter was settled for good.  When I saw it on the cover, though, the two-part title troubled me.  Not only was it inconsistent with the title and cover design for
A Christmas Adventure in Little Italy
, it seemed to me that the “lead” title,
An Adventure on Stage
, detracted from the subtitle,
How Jimmy Finds His Voice
.  Moreover, I had come to like the subtitle better than the lead. 
How Jimmy Finds His Voice
had really grown on me.

The solution???  Easy!  Get rid of
An Adventure on Stage
and make
How Jimmy Finds His Voice
the only title.  One final bit of fine-tuning was to delete the “How.”  That resulted in the following cover design, which we sent to Mill City in fulfillment of the “front cover design” requirement in their publication timetable: