Had you asked me when I was growing up how a book cover was created and published, I would have imagined a lot of fancy tools and sophisticated 'official' processes...
This story of two girls using voice memos and photos of perfume bottles and pinterest boards and hilarious sketches and iPhone markups and self-publishing a cover (that was hated by most of the publishing industry but loved by many of its readers) is not totally what I would have had in mind but here we go.
This is the story behind my first book cover ~ Magnolia Parks.
When I turned 21 I got an internship in Sydney and within a week I left the home I grew up in and arrived in Sydney on November 19, 2011.
My first Sydney friend was a girl named Jasmine. She invited me to an event where I met this very tall, very beautiful girl named Jessie who had a barbie umbrella with a whistle on it.
She clearly had zero interest in meeting me, let alone being my 'second Sydney friend', so we had a somewhat cold exchange and that was that.
When I got home I was on Facebook (the social media platform of the moment in 2011) and Jessie’s bio was this beautifully written piece about the power of words, about how everything began with words “let there be light” and ended with words “it is finished.” I started drafting a message to let her know how incredible I thought her writing was but before I could press send, she had written to me about the artworks I had in my Facebook photo albums. We decided to work together and set up a “work date” at Bondi Junction where we sat on the couches outside of the cinemas and she talked to me about her books and I showed her my drawings.
*above - one of our first writing+drawing experiments
That quickly blossomed into not only a collaborative partnership but also the kind of friendship where it feels a lot more like sisters. I am the Godmother to her son and our souls are tied in this very magical tangly kind of way where it doesn’t matter where I am in the world, the sound of her voice making very rambly ADHD voice memos (no offense Jessie) is home.
Our first cover began with this sketch of Jessie’s. I remember her driving us to McDonald’s for a late-night-drive-through-moment. She was describing all the different moving parts she wanted on this cover. I was imploring her to at least do her best to draw it all because I wasn’t entirely following.
These “Jessie-versions” have become a staple in our creative process and it’s my favourite part.
I got an iPad for my 30th birthday and tested out Procreate for the first time. I created an artwork of Rey from Star Wars and a Parisian-style house and then decided I was officially ready to embark on my first book cover (lol, spoiler: I was not).
I spent an entire night doing a deer's head because I knew I had to get that right, this was Magnolia Parks after all.
And then I did iteration after iteration of different parts of the cover.
I think Jessie and I worked back and forth on this cover for about 8 months?
Work-in-progress pieces are always hard to share just because they can be so cringy - but this is a bit of a behind-the-scenes of our process for the shield in the center.
Jessie would send colour inspiration through perfume bottles and I would send janky half-done pieces and she would take screenshots and make directions using the mark-up tool on her iPhone. Often as Jessie sees something come to life she has this brilliant creative flash of a way to make it better so you can kind of see how this evolved from the initial concept to the finished piece.
Here's the final piece below because my artist ego needs a palette cleanser after these work-in-progress pics.
In June of 2021, Jessie self-published our very first cover for Magnolia Parks 1.
We have had to fight so hard to keep these covers available which is funny because the whole reason we wanted to do this ourselves is that we felt the cover industry, especially at the time, needed disruption. But I guess some industries are resistant to change and there's a certain comment thread on a certain release of a certain "publisher-requested" cover that was to replace our original that suggests we were right... but I forget what I am allowed/not allowed to say on this matter so I'll leave it at this.
I'm proud of this cover and every cover we've created since and I hold a special place in my heart for the agents/publishers/bookstores who fought alongside Jessie to keep it.