Book Cover Journey

Salutations all,

I hope you are all enjoying August, I know I am probably because my birthday is this month.

Quarantine birthdays are a great deal calmer than my usual ones.

For today's post, I wanted to talk about the cover for "To Catch a Rebel" and how it came to be. I had so many ideas in my head, and I didn't want an ordinary cover. I wanted something that would stand out on shelves. I'm so lucky that the design team at Olympia Publishers were so hardworking and open to all my ideas.

First I was told to send covers that I liked that they could draw inspiration from, so I mentioned "Belles" by Dhonielle Clayton and "Dread Nation" by Justina Ireland which look very different in color and tone but they both feature a girl of color front and center and that was the main thing I wanted. So they sent me this cover...

It would have a suited if it was a middle-grade book instead of Young Adult and the crown looked too Eurocentric for a story set in a futuristic Nigeria, so a told them that and also said I liked the idea of the silhouette of a girl. They sent this back...

Well, the silhouette is a girl of color now. At the start what annoyed me was that the designers don't actually read the manuscript, but Olympia is one of the smaller publishers so that's understandable. I ended up sending them some pictures that made me think of my main character. This came back ...

Which I loved, the red cloth in the background, the headtie, everything. but the title just didn't do it for me, so one last try and we get...

The amazing final version that we have today. I can't thank the designers at Olympia enough and when all of this over, I can't wait to meet them in person.

So that's it for today. Are any of you guys born in August? What do you think of the cover?

Talk to you next week.