Cover Stories by Jennifer Banash

When I got the email from my editor at Penguin telling me that the cover for my first YA novel THE ELITE was ready for me to view, I was ecstatic. As any author will tell you, the moment the cover of your first book is unveiled is electric and magical.

That is if it doesn’t completely suck.

The first mock up of THE ELITE was horrendous beyond words. It featured a stark white cover and the body of a headless girl wearing some sort of atrocious tube top and jeans that looked vaguely acid washed, standing in what looked like a warehouse, surrounded by racks of blurry clothes. To say that I hated it was an understatement. I was violently opposed to my name being anywhere near that cover, much less plastered across the front. So I did something I never thought in a million years I’d ever do--I begged.

After twenty minutes of sobbing into my cell phone with my editor listening patiently on the other end, she took pity on me and relented, telling me that she’d talk to the art department and would see what she could work out, but not to get my hopes up as a complete redesign would be very expensive. But someone up there must kind of like me because two days later I was looking at the final cover of THE ELITE, and I was in love with it. That gorgeous cover image of the blond wearing the kick-ass dark shades, sparkly sequins in the background blurred by the camera’s movement, said everything I wanted to get across in an image about the series itself. It was glamorous, urban, and very, very sexy.

Fast forward four months later--I was in the middle of editing IN TOO DEEP when an email from my editor appeared in my inbox, cover photos attached. There were two images to choose from for the final cover—one was so hideous that I’ve clearly repressed it as I can literally remember NOTHING about it, and the other was the cover that you will see in less than a week on bookstore shelves. I loved everything about it from the Kate Bosworth-esque model, to the insanely fabulous blue eyelashes she’s so confidently rocking. At that moment I couldn’t imagine that I would ever have a cover I liked better than IN TOO DEEP.

Happily, I was wrong.

Last week my editor sent me the final cover version for the third book in the ELITE series, SIMPLY IRRISTIBLE, and if I was in love with the covers for THE ELITE and IN TOO DEEP, I am psychotically obsessed with the cover for SI! I love how mysterious and dreamy the image is, the profile of the model, the color scheme—everything! But, more importantly, now that I’m debuting the cover here on Hope’s Bookshelf for the first time, what do YOU think?

xo
JB