My dear friend Annie Parsons and I had coffee last week. I’ll tell ya, that girl. She’s a gem. Don’t even get me started.
Anyways, she said, “Um, you’ve never told us the story of the book cover like you said you would.”
She’s right.
So here you go.
. . . . .
Early this spring, I was sitting at Panera with my agent Kyle and we got an email from Zondervan with the design for the cover of Perfectly Unique.
He opened it and turned his computer screen to me. I teared up. Immediately.
[Shocking absolutely no one who has known me longer than this blog post.]
It was perfect. It was everything I would have wanted. It was personal to me and totally spoke my language.
“Who did this?” I asked him.
“Just a designer at Zondervan I guess,” Kyle said, “I don’t know who.”
“Well,” I looked at him, “email this editor back and tell her to give that designer a BIG FAT HUG because he/she NAILED IT. How in the WORLD does that person not know me? It looks so so much like me.”
In a world where the author has zero say in the original design or which humans lay their hands on the making of this book, it was just a real gift from God to absolutely cry over the beauty of this thang.
. . . . .
I put the jpeg on Anita the iPhone and showed that puppy off like it was a trophy. I would stop any friend that I saw ANYWHERE and “offer” [is that the right word?] to show it to them.
I have a few graphic designer friends and each one I would say, “I mean, seriously. Are you DYING? Isn’t it AMAZING? It looks JUST LIKE ME, right?”
And because they are generous human beings, they would say yes and smile and truly, everyone has liked it.
I remember showing my pal Micah at a table in Portland Brew and, as previously stated, totally gushing.
. . . . .
About three weeks later I was texting Micah about some other things about his lovely wife and her birthday or something and then he said this about my book cover. [He’s in white, I’m in green.]
WAIT. WHAT. HUH. [And dear reader, just FYI, this is what the VAST MAJORITY of text message convos with boys look like for me. Just so you know. I’m a talker. And boys love that, right? #sarcasm]
Micah Kandros is one of the best graphic designers in this town and Zondervan had NO idea we were even friends, but what a miracle that one of my friends who knows me well but is also an insanely talented artist designed the cover for Perfectly Unique. I am so grateful to Micah for the beautiful design. [You should look through his other designs and d.r.o.o.l. So so amazing.]
So please. Judge this book by it’s cover.
. . . . .
And that, ladies and gents, is how the cover of Perfectly Unique is a miraculous thing.