Cover Stories: The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin (Paperback)

I noticed that Josh Berk's novel, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, got a completely revised paperback cover this summer, so I asked Josh to come back and share the new Cover Story. Because his original one? Highly entertaining.

Here's Josh:

"As mentioned in my previous Cover Story, Will Halpin (the star of THE DARK DAYS OF HAMBURGER HALPIN) was once a cartoon and is now a real boy! On the cover of the hardcover, Will (along with his co-stars Ebony and Devon) was rendered cartoon-style by French artist Philippe Petit-Roulet. It was a very cool cover (right), but for the paperback I was informed that my publisher was going to 'go in a different direction.' (I'm not sure why I put that in quotes because it may not be a direct quote.)

"Various other directions were suggested. For example, one had as its central image an old diagram of the lobes of the human brain. It looked a lot like this:

"The title was zooming out of the guy's ear. It looked really awesome to me, but it was decided that it didn't exactly say 'teen friendly.' There was also a version of the cover pitched which had a bunch of crows spelling the title in yarn. I thought this was great too! (I'm not hard to please I guess...) It's hard to explain, but it looked awesome. Alas, it was deemed as not exactly the 'teen vibe.' (Note: Teens don't love crows? They should. Crows are awesome. Maybe teens hate yarn.)

"So the next cover pitched was this black and white image of a dude walking in the woods..."

Read the rest of Josh's Cover Story at melissacwalker.com.

Cover Stories: The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk

The hilarious Josh Berk is here to share his Cover Story for The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, which is a cartoon right now but will soon be a real boy...

Take it away, Josh!

"I'm not at all good at what you would call the visual arts. I can't draw or paint and I don't have a good eye for color. For example, one time my wife asked me to name the color of the walls in our apartment (we were not in the apartment at the time, but we were living there) and I simply could not do it. I had no idea! Turns out they were bright green and I had been living there for two years and never really noticed.

"You see my point.

"Anyway, so when people asked me if I gave input on the cover of my book or had ideas about the cover or anything like that, I always say 'none whatsoever, and that's a good thing.' I literally had no ideas and I literally gave no input. I figured I'd let the professional cover artists and jacket designers and so forth do their thing, free of input from an author who doesn't even know the colors of his own walls.

"So the first thing that happened once we got to 'cover time' was that my editor sent me an email stating that the artist had been chosen, and it was Philippe Petit-Roulet.

I had no idea who that was, other than that it sounded very French and thus impressive..."

Read the rest of Josh's story, and see his spine!, at melissacwalker.com.