Did you interact with Ng when planning your design?
I worked closely with the art director, Darren Haggar. We bounced around ideas and tried to figure out a mood/setting that would best capture the closeness and secrets in this particular town. I came across Amy Bennett’s artwork and we both felt we’d hit upon something.
What were some ideas for this book that you didnât end up using?
Some of the ideas were very abstract and some were too specific to the book. I painted some tudor homes.Â
What is your favorite part of your job? Whatâs the hardest?
I love reading the manuscripts. The hardest part is creating a cover that fits the tone of the book and that is also visually striking.
How has your approach to designing covers changed over time? What did you most want this cover to convey? Â
I was especially pulled into Ng’s book. I really loved the compellingly intricate and complex storyline and characters. The hard part is the process. I do a lot of art/photo research and sometimes create my own illustrations or hand-lettering, which can all take time. For this particular cover, finding Amy Bennett’s artwork was a perfect fit for Ng’s book. The evening hues, the aerial view of winding roads and the light in the homes, the idyllic sweet suburban street. You know that all can’t be right here.Â
Thank you so much for following along with The Life of A Book! Be sure to grab a copy of Little Fires Everywhere, especially now you know all the behind-the-scenes work that has shaped it.
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Whatâs a book or a series that youâve worked on that you think is more of your type or style?
I tend to be drawn to books that are girl-centric. I have a little boy at home who has opened my eyes to a much broader range of reading, but Iâm always a thirteen, fourteen-year-old girl at heart. Mouse Scouts is one of my favorites; itâs about a troop of little girl scouts who happen to be mice, thatâs kind of me in a nutshell. There are some editors who excel at really gritty things, edgy teen fiction, male-centric narrativesâand thatâs not really my core strength. But the Illuminae Files was so immediately accessible and the female characters were so well-drawn and felt like friends – it broke though and worked, even for a âgirlâ editor.
What was your favorite part about Gemina or something that surprised or interested you about this second book?
Well itâs a trilogy, and I knew the second book was going to introduce a new set of characters and situations as well as advance the larger story. I think what has surprised me is the way the authors continue to one-up themselves. Thereâs are a couple of big plot twists in Illuminae and there are three or four twists in Gemina. As a reader I didnât see them coming, and even as an editor who went into the story with a sense of how events were going to play out, I still didnât see those things coming. Thatâs a huge treat– to go into a book with a certain set of expectations and having them completely blown apart because what comes in is so much more entertaining. InIlluminae the protagonists are sort of like the hometown sweethearts: They are great kids, very engaging, very personable. InGemina the âheroesâ arenât set up the same way. The female lead isnât particularly likable. Sheâs spoiled, sheâs very pampered, she very me-centric. The male lead is kind of the lovable anti-hero. Heâs a gang member, heâs covered in tattoos that allude to a violent history, he deals drugs, so on the surface heâs not necessarily someone you see emerging as the hero. But youâre so swept up in who they are and how they change and grow over the course of the story that it completely changes your perception.
People tend to think “editor” when they think of publishing, but many may not know the details of your job. So: when you get a manuscript what happens next? How do you start making a book?
It starts with a lot of dry administrative things; we sign the book up, we go to a contract, and then I start by working backward from when we anticipate that we want the book to come out. We work with our internal production and design groups to mastermind a schedule.
Because this is such a complex book visually, the design aspects require a lot more time than a typical book might, with its tidy lines of text on a page. For Illuminae and Gemina, literally every page is a different design. The authors were also heavily involved in the design inspiration for the book, so we had to factor them into the blueprint when we were setting up the schedules.
Once we had a schedule down, it was easier to address the more straightforward editorial things with the authors. We communicate primarily through email because theyâre in Australia, which is a fourteen-hour time difference. I went through the book with big-picture things in mind, like what could be improved and what did we have questions about.
Once we feel like weâve really gotten a story in the best possible shape, it goes over to the copy editor who knows how to do everything I donât know how to do in terms of grammar and consistency. Itâs really cleaning the text for things we might not have caught in the editorial process. Copyediting a book of this size takes about four to six weeks. The manuscript then goes back to the authors so they can address any queries that the copy editor has found. They generally have about a month with it and then we send it to our design group. And from there, the book needs a minimum of ten months to come together before finally going to the printer, with numerous passes and reviews by everybody in between.
These are two original concepts we tried for the jacket:
Given the non-traditional reading experience and the fact that the whole conceit of the book is based on  documentation, we wanted to find a way to present all of those documents visually. These ideas got dismissed very early on, but they ended up inspiring the case cover design, where designer Ray Shapell was able to let loose with the whole idea of redaction, leaking classified lines, and showing hand-written communications from the characters. Although abandoning the original jacket designs felt like a setback initially, the process brought us directly to final packaging.
These cover concepts look a lot more like traditional sci-fi to me.
They do. At the time the first book, Illuminae, was coming together, we hadnât really seen sci-fi break though on a young adult level, so we were trying to arrive at a cover look that wouldnât scare off readers who arenât traditional fans of the genre. Â But I think these books have really broken the mold.
I think a lot of people wouldnât realize an editor not only deals with the content of the book, but that you have a say in the cover design and youâre a big part of those discussions. Is there anything else that would surprise someone outside of publishing about your job?
I donât sit at my desk and edit. 99% of my editorial work takes place at my kitchen table or my couch on the weekends. Most of my editorial life in the office is spent at meetings or answering emails, and I need to disengage from the office in order to really get into a creative mind space.
Photo Credit: Christopher Tovo
Why do you think fans are responding so strongly to this series, outside of its non-traditional layout?
I think anybody who has met the authors in person feels like theyâve met characters from the book. Their personalities inform every single character in the story; theyâre funny, theyâre intense, their rapport together just makes you want to sit back and watch them talk to each other. Their writing process involved sending each other blind chapters, and they wrote some passages by text messaging each other rather than sitting side by side, nursing every line in a common voice. So their individual writing personas feel intact and their living, breathing process gets contained in the book. Â I think thatâs something readers can sense when they read it – Itâs just a very personal reading experience, and they make it super accessible. I remember saying to someone, âit may be 600 pages long, but you could easily give it to a reluctant reader,â because there are all these different visuals to break up the reading experience, and the humor and voices and the pace just sweep you along.
Is there anything else people might like to know about the book?
AÂ slightly non-standard occurrence happened this summer when we sent the authors some pre-press pages to signâ4,000 pages, to be exact. UPS got the address wrong, and Jay was running around trying to locate the boxes. One thing you have to know about Jay is that heâs a big guy and he does a really amazing job of pulling off a badass author persona, but the truth is heâs a total sweetheart. So when he emailed to say that he had found the boxes and stole them off of someoneâs porch, I just had to laugh. Thatâs the kind of stuff that happens working with these two: petty theft might be involved. Thereâs always something slightly unusual that comes together.
Read more about Gemina and Illuminae below, and be sure to check back soon for more behind-the-scenes interviews!
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