Photo Shoot
It's all about book covers. Do you think authors have any say in the book covers for their books? No, my friend no, we don't. We are totally at the mercy of the whims of the marketing department on that one. Most of my covers I've liked. Or at least I'm okay with them. I've only detested one book cover, and it's out of print now anyway so it's not listed on this site—although you can still see it floating around on eBay and at the Amazon used book section. I don't have to tell you its name—if you see it, you will know which one I'm talking about.
So much for the old saying: You can't judge a book by its cover. I tell you at book signings I had to positively push that book on people.
"Really," I'd promise, "I know the cover is hideous, but the words are just as good as the words in my other books. Look—" I'd hold up the book and flip the pages in their direction. "These are extra deluxe words."
Sometimes people would buy the book just because they were afraid I'd follow them out the store if they didn't. Hey, when you're selling books you do whatever works.
Anyway, for my book How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-boyfriend, my editor (hereafter referred to as The Bow-tied One) wanted to go a different direction than my previous covers. Instead of using a drawing, he wanted a photograph of some sort, and he asked me to do a photo shoot so he could see my vision for the book. Isn't that nice? Isn't that considerate of an editor to take an author's view point into consideration like that? Well, it would have been if he'd actually used any of my ideas, but no, he saw my photos and decided to do something completely different. Still, I thought you—my loyal fans—would like to see what I would have done with the cover.
The eyes have it
My eighteen year old daughter always gets dragged into my cover attempts. She didn’t even have a choice. But we had to find a hot guy to photograph with her so I could show her on the cover holding his picture. That was the hard part.
"Come on," I told her. "You know hot guys. Just call one up and ask if he can come over."
She gave me the typical teenager glare. "You want me to call up some guy and ask him to come over so my mother can take pictures of him draping his arms around me?"
"Yes," I said.
More glaring on her part, and probably some lecture on how I don’t understand her. I block those out.
She gave a talk at church that day, reporting on her humanitarian trip to Peru and the work her youth group did there. "Did you check out the congregation for cute guys?" I asked her afterwards.
"There was one in the front row," she said. "But I don’t know who he is."
"Well, this would be a good way for you to get to know him," I said.
She gave me a humorless stare. "Why can’t you be like other mothers?"
"I am like other mothers, just not boring," I said.
Later, because she was being so uncooperative about finding eligible hotties, I decided to point out some potential cute guys to her—and let me add that they were really cute.
She let out a tortured sigh. "I can’t ask Mormon missionaries to come over to my house and pose in photos with me. They’re not allowed to touch girls while they’re serving on missions."
"But it would be service," I pointed out. "They’re supposed to be doing that sort of thing, aren’t they?"
After shooting down all my attempts to be helpful, she agreed, reluctantly, to call Westin, who is the older brother of one of her friends. She didn’t think he’d accept the offer and wasn’t sure if he even had a cowboy hat. Luckily he did and he did.
Westin was even a good sport about having a middle aged woman drag him around in different poses with her daughter. I mean how many guys would stand (and sit, and snuggle) for 144 pictures? Yes, that’s how many I had to take to ensure that I got some really good ones where neither one of them was closing their eyes or making faces—or that my daughter wouldn’t veto because she looks too ___ (insert any adjective that teenage girls don’t like into the blank).
And I did get some good shots. I know all you girls out there are wishing your mother needed 144 pictures of you with some hot guy. I liked the covers that my daughter and I put together so much, in fact, that afterwards when I worked on How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-boyfriend I could only imagine Jesse looking like Westin. I told him that he could never come to our house again without a cowboy hat because it would just be all wrong.
My editor decided not to use my covers or any of the pictures of Westin, which I also thought was all wrong. I mean, I’m sure the guy they put on the cover is very nice, and he’s attractive, and if his mother is reading this: You should be very proud of your son. But in my mind he isn’t Jesse. Jesse is that guy with the cowboy hat sitting with my daughter. So everybody, feel free to print out Westin’s picture and stick it on your copy of How to Take the Ex Out of Ex-boyfriend. That’s what I’ve done.
I thought you'd enjoy seeing the covers and some of the pictures from the photo shoot that day. Here they are:
Cover 1
Cover 2
Cover 3
Cover 4
Cover 5
The photo, before being ripped up
Look what followed me home, Mom. Can I keep him?
Little sister never fails to get in the act and welcome big sister's guests!
One of the reasons I had to take 144 pictures of Westin was that he kept shutting his eyes. I bet real cowboys don't have that problem.
Here I was talking in a school marm voice. Teenagers just don't appreciate my sophisticated humor.
This is what happens when you wear chocolate-covered buttons.
Our dog is a photo hound. As you can see my daughter is a true animal lover.
I made her make all sorts of facial expressions with these pictures. I think here she's promising to love, honor, and obey . . .
Did you ever wonder
where I come up with my plot ideas? Here is a story my daughter emailed me about she and Westin this winter:
Westin and I walked out into the parking lot. It was snowing lightly—it had been snowing the entire day—and all the cars were covered in snow. The one time I hadn’t parked underground, it snowed. Typical.
We walked to my car and started brushing the snow off. I tried to open the door to get the ice scraper, but the key wouldn’t go it. Had the lock frozen? My door had frozen shut once before, so it could be possible that some water had gotten in the lock and frozen. I started pushing the buttons on the little key thing, thinking I could at least get the trunk open. Nothing worked. My car was one solid, frozen mass.
"Here Westin, you try." I handed him the key.
After he struggled with it, he turned to me. "This isn’t the right key."
"It’s the only key on there. It’s the right one."
"But it’s not going in!"
"So the lock must be frozen."
"But look, the key is stopping at the same point in all the locks. This isn’t the right key."
I rolled my eyes and took the keys from Westin. Of course this was the right key—it was the only one that was on my key chain. I got down on my knees and started breathing onto the lock. Maybe my breath would melt it enough for me to get the key in.
"Nice," said Westin. "Making out with your car."
I ignored him.
While I was blowing into the lock, I looked into the window of my car. There was a hat sitting on a gear shift.
I didn’t have a hat like that. Who had been driving my car?
Wait.
My car didn’t have a gear shift either.
Crap.
The problem wasn’t the key. The key worked just fine. I just had the wrong car.
I stood up. "So, uh Westin," I started. It would be best to just come out with the truth—there was no way that I could even try to cover this one up. "This isn’t my car."
We found my car a few cars down the row, with the trunk wide open. I knew my keys worked just fine.
