Cover Stories: The Kid Table by Andrea Seigel

Andrea Seigel had some visual ups and downs with her novel The Kid Table, but she ended up with what I think is a really clean, funny, standout cover.

Here's how she got there:

"I read your blog all the time, so I know a lot of authors say they're not visually oriented, butI always have covers in my head. In Kid Table one of the main characters tries to burn the table with a lighter, so probably the first image I pictured was of a magnified formal place card with the book's title in fancy lettering, but the place card destroyed with charred edges, chewed gum stuck to it, etc.

"Bloomsbury told me they were scheduling a photo shoot, so they asked what I thought Ingrid, the narrator, looked like and how she dressed. I started to get nervous at that point because I'd never pictured a cover with an actual person on it, but something more conceptual instead. I told my editor that Ingrid wasn't traditionally cute--in the book she says that she'll get called handsome a lot when she gets older--and I gave them actress Emily VanCamp and model Lauren Bush as examples. These were the pictures I sent. You know, strong nose:

As for Ingrid's clothes, I said she dresses like one of the Robert Palmer video girls (right). In the first event of the book, her hair is slicked back with gel, and she's described as going for simple, sleek mini-dresses.

"When I saw the cover mockup, I had a major meltdown. The emailed image came into my box minutes before I was leaving to drive out to the desert to teach a class, and I just thought, 'Nononononononono'....

Read the rest of Andrea's Cover Story, and see the original mockups, at melissacwalker.com.