Guest Post: Judging a Book by its Cover – Maggie Dana

Work: day off

Back in January, Blithe Traveler was kind enough to review Maggie Dana’s first book, Keeping Secrets. Since then, I have discovered it is even more fun to give the authors room to comment on their own books and the process of writing. Without further ado, welcome Maggie:

It’s really all about shoes
You’ve written a great equestrian novel. Its characters ride like demons, their horses leap off the page, and your scenes explode with action. The ending is mind blowing. It leaves your readers breathless for more.

Now all you need a cover.

Okay, let’s back up for a minute. If you have a publisher who’s calling the shots, you probably won’t have much input on this. You’ll be at the mercy of an art department’s hurried choice of a horse doing something . . . whatever strikes their fancy, whether it’s appropriate for your book or not. Most people (especially editors and art directors at major publishing houses) don’t know a horse from a hamster, never mind the nuances of a horse’s reaction to a given situation.

Have you ever looked at covers for equestrian fiction?

Most are cringe-worthy. It’s the rare publisher who gets it right, never mind frantic phone calls and emails from horsey authors who know what their books’ covers ought to be depicting.

Case in point: Several years ago a big NY publisher was preparing to release my friend’s debut equestrian novel. They sent her the cover, as a formality, and she hit the roof. Hardly surprising, given the photo showed a woman in a flimsy nightgown with bare feet leading a droopy-eared horse from the wrong side. Fortunately, the author’s agent went to bat for her and they got the cover changed.

I wrote my first children’s horse book for Weekly Reader, a long time ago. They allowed me to choose the illustrator for the cover and interior art, and it worked out superbly well because the artist was a horsewoman. Then came a series of middle-grade horse books for Troll (now an imprint of Scholastic) that I developed with Jane Stine at Parachute Press (they produced Goosebumps). Again, it was a positive experience because Jane listened to my concerns over the visual parts of the stories.

Fast forward to the early 2000s. By this time I’d switched, temporarily, to writing women’s fiction and my debut novel, Beachcombing, was published by Macmillan in 2009 (it had nothing to do with horses). They sent me a PDF of the cover art—I was fine with it—but they’d changed the book’s title from my original (Painting Naked) to their choice, Beachcombing. I argued, and lost.

These days, publishing is a moving target—much like the fashion industry. I have wide feet, so I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes it’s best to buy shoes first, then choose an outfit to go with them—kind of like picking a cover for your book before you begin the story. This way you can make sure things match up.

How many times have you read a novel about horses where there’s not a dapple gray in the entire story, nor a woman with white-blond hair, yet that’s what appears on the cover? When writing for kids, it’s even more important to get these details right. Those eagle-eyed, horsecrazy eleven-year-olds will be all over you if you mess up.

However, with a little judicious tweaking, you can always make your story fit the photo you’ve fallen in love with. But don’t do it unless it’s absolutely right. Just be sure that whatever appears on the outside, reflects what’s happening on inside, and give yourself double brownie points if it doesn’t pinch your toes.

So, the whole point of this is: Choose your cover art, early in the process, and run it by people whose opinions you trust. After finishing book two of my new middle-grade horse series, I thought I’d found the perfect cover photograph to depict a dramatic scene near the beginning of the story. The photo had it all—the right color horse, doing the right stuff … all the way down to the gloves worn by the woman wrestling with it—till I shared my Photoshop masterpiece with several horsey friends and asked for their opinion.

The criticisms were legion, and they were right.

From Ellen Broadhurst: “I can’t work out what is going on with the rider. Are those reins she’s holding? … I found the juxtaposition of what appeared to be schooling with full show-ring garb jarring.”

Kathy* Walcott brought me down to earth with: “From a design POV, the base is busy—text and fence—while the top one quarter is empty. Also, why is she dressed in show clothes with gloves but no helmet? If she’s about to show, why isn’t her hair tidier? Why the jacket if she still has to tack up?”

I had no answers to these very pertinent questions. In the actual story, the woman in this scene was in normal barn attire—jeans, t-shirt, and riding boots, not white breeches and hunt jacket. And, as a professional trainer, she would’ve known better than to leave a trail of lunge line pooling at her feet. But for a moment, this particular photograph struck a cord with me and painted what I thought was a perfect picture.

It’s these mad moments of wanting the shoes to fit that need to be wrestled into perspective. No matter how many miles you walk, they will always remind your feet who’s the boss.

The moral of all this? If you have a choice of cover art, trust the instincts of your horse-loving friends. They will give your reins a sharp tug … to say nothing of laughing themselves silly over those sparkly, five-inch-heel heel muck boots you found on e-Bay.

Thanks to invaluable input like this, here is my final cover art for Racing into Trouble, Book Two of my Timber Ridge Riders series.

Maggie Dana
Author of books for horse-crazy girls … and their horse-crazy moms
www.maggiedana.com

Links to Maggie’s books
Book 1: Keeping Secrets
Amazon Kindle
B&N Nook
print version

Book 2: Racing into Trouble
Amazon Kindle

Thank you Maggie.
What is the best/worst cover art you have seen on a horse book? [RS]

Previous book posts: Keeping Secrets by Maggie Dana, reviewed by Ellen Broadhurst
Guest Blogger: Linda Benson, writer of The Girl Who Remembered Horses
Guest Post: Art Imitates Life by Jennifer Walker

[* I’ve know Maggie since I was wee, so she is allowed to use my childhood name. None of the rest of you are.]

Say Aaaah!

Work: PM1 heat therapy/PM2 groom, short walk.
Report: No amount of DST helps if I can’t lever my butt out of bed until brunch.

Ramblings: I have magic counting hands. Rodney’s gastric medication requires 14 pills per dose – there’s a lot of horse to dose. I’m amazed how often my randomly poured handful is exactly 14 pills.

Pounded into powder and mixed with water, these make a vile-tasting, bright yellow liquid that gets squirted over his back teeth twice a day. He’s really very good about it. He might wave his head a trifle or walk off a few steps, but once the inevitable is inevitable, he’s close to stoic. The second time you came near me with medical intentions, I’d be heading for the far side of the pasture at Mach 2. Mathilda fights us to a draw for worming. You would NEVER get paste meds into her mouth twice a day. I’m repeating myself [Head Games], but I want to be sure he gets all the props he deserves.

Can you count by handfuls?

Point of 100 Meetings

Work: AM rain/PM heat therapy.
Report: Instead of putting both heating pads on his back near the scar tissue, I put the second over his Bai Hui point. He got all soft-eyed, droopy-lipped, and sleepy.

Ramblings: At least, he was sleepy right up to the point when he gave a whole body shake and the pad fell off with a thud. Since the scar is on the saddle area, I can strap a pad down with an overgirth. The other one was just balanced on this butt. He did not appreciate a loud thumpy noise in the middle of his nap.

Some days, I think he is a wood horse who needs reenforcement to his yang meridians. Some days, I think his muscles are tight and he appreciates the heat. Some days, I think it makes him feel good in the moment but is an overall waste of time.

Have you done accupressure with your horse?

[PO100M name taken from an equine accupressure app put out by Tallgrass.]

Survey Says …

Work: AM heat therapy/PM groom & exercises: crossrails, plank, weave cones, reverse poles, & log.
Report: Lowkey runthrough of all exercises to reintroduce the idea of double sessions. Walked over, on, through everything & groundtied while I adjusted a crossrail.

Ramblings: The American Horse Publications, of which I am an Individual Member, would ask that you take 15 minutes to answer their 2012 Equine Industry Survey through SurveyMonkey. The 50+ questions took me ~13 minutes, mostly due to an overabundance of precision which meant I kept having to write my response under Other. Deadline is May 15, 2012. Do it now before you forget. The more data, the more likelihood magazines and websites will carry articles of interest to the largest number of people.

What is your favorite horse magazine?

Here’s Your Ticket, Pack Your Bags

Work: day off.
Report: I’m gonna be burning down a house. No worries, the conflagration less lyrical, more legal. The bag in question holds my turnout gear.

Cute horse and fire anecdote: We were on a brushfire, which is a small, tame, domestic version of a woodland fire. Usually someone is burning trash and “left it for just a minute.” By the time we arrive, low flames are spreading in an everwidening circle across a pasture, field, or lawn. As long as one has enough folks to head off the growing arc, the flames can just about be spit out.

flapper

So there I was stomping and flapping out the sparks when a call went out for help catching a horse. Now, I’m a mediocre firefighter at best. This isn’t false modesty. Firefighting requires upper body strength, mechanical ability, and teamwork. Three things I’m not known for. Catching a horse? That I can do. So I drifted over to the next field. Half of the field had burned. Engine 266 was moving down the fire line spraying water. A young chestnut stood in the unburned section watching. A halter and leadrope were pressed into my hands. The halter didn’t fit, so I had to jury-rig the rope. The colt (?) stood still while I fiddled. He walked along next to me, his only requirement was that be allowed to face the fire to keep an eye on it. An exceedingly reasonable request.

As we passed through the gate to the next field, the fellow holding the gate dropped the metal chain onto the metal gate, producing a bodacious noise. At which point, the poor fellow came completely unstuck. He handled fire, water, flocks of strangers in weird clothes, even a big red engine invading his field. The noise was too much.

I shudder to think what my finely tuned sporthorses would have made of the whole thing.

How does your horse handle sudden unexpected events?

Previous FF posts: Manic Monday, The Fish/Pond Equation.

Numbers Game

Work: PM therapy/EVE grooming scheduled, even likely.
Report: The day to dive into our new schooling program was not today. Spring advances and retreats. As do I.

Ramblings: The delayed appearance of February’s end of the month ponderings on blogging. In order to keep up with a daily blog, I need to follow the inspiration of day and reestablish my schedule when I can.

Why Numbers Don’t Matter
First of all, which numbers? Daily hits do not take into account the kind folks who have signed up to follow by email. Since the text appears in their inbox, they never have to click over. Therefore, they are not counted in the mesmerizing bar graph that I see at the top of my blog page. In addition, what do I count these folks as? They could be avid fans, waiting with bated breath for the next appearance of my daily adventures (a dog can dream), or they could be friends or family members who listed their email out of sense of duty but who skip right past the resultant inbox-clogging messages. The world may never know.

Plus that silly graph is relative. A big spike could mean a 1000 viewers or it could mean that today you scored 7 instead of the normal 2.

Over in the right corner is an cardinal number that registers the number of new comments or likes. The dull gray background switches to orange when it is nonzero. Imagine my excitement when it read 8. Only to find I had just posted a blog with several references to past blogs and it was registering my own ping-backs.

Then there are actual hits. I try not to pull up the My Stats page too often. My bar graph resembles a mountain range. A few vertical peaks, generally on guest post days, separated by long sloping valleys. The brief excitement of a big bar of blue is quickly offset by the dramatic fall off that follows. Don’t they love me anymore? Did they take one look at the text and vow never to return? In the absence of data, the mind – at least my mind – fills in all manner of horror scenarios.

Self-styled Internet gurus will say that tracking the numbers will give you a sense of what works. First off, there are no Internet gurus. It’s all too new. No one truly has a clue what works and what doesn’t. Second, clicking on a page doesn’t mean that the reader likes what she finds. A steady upswell of hits is the best indication that folks liked your past blogs. Okay, the views by country graphic is cool. I feel so international.

The golden currency is comments. The commenter exists, gets counted, and lets you know, for good or ill. Bloggers love comments and I wallow in despair when a post doesn’t rate one. Don’t they love me anymore? Did they take one look at the text and vow never to return? (You may be sensing a trend here. This has been pointed out before.)

This is hardly unique thinking. Other bloggers have wrestled with overcoming the number fascination: Shelli Johnson, Why I Stopped Looking At The Numbers.

Let’s say I end up on Fresh Pressed and have 10,000 viewers who stay with me. What does that mean? Does it change the way I put on my pants in the morning? Does it make Rodney more ridable? The reader I really want to impress is the person who hands out article assignments at the New Yorker, but I have no idea if he or she looks at Fresh Pressed.

Numbers don’t guarantee happiness. I wish I could write a post half as funny as Hyperbole and a Half’s Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving. That post alone has 2471 comments. H&1/2 has numbers that would cause rage and jealousy in any blogger prone to those low emotions. The popularity of her blog has gotten her a book deal. Yet she doesn’t not appear to be a happy person, Adventures in Depression.

Would winning the blogging lottery change my life? Not according to John Candy in Cool Runnings: “Derice, a gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”

Why Numbers Matter
The conviction that I will write for myself sounds all high-minded and artistic. It’s also field fertilizer. By definition, anyone who posts wants to be read. Otherwise, we’d be keeping private journals tucked in bedside table drawers or filed on hard-drives. We want to reach out.

Dr. Beverly Hofstadter would say that we, “Suffer from an external locus of identity.” We define ourselves by the way others accept us. I say this is not a bad thing or a good thing. It is simply a human thing. We do not live in vacuums. Emotionally, we are not far from the days when social acceptance meant a place closer to the fire, and ostracism meant a place on the edge, in the dark, where there is less food and more lions.

Synthesis
Many arguments against obsessing over numbers and the knowledge that none of those arguments will stop me from checking my hit count, envying folks with double digit comments, or fiddling with my tags to make them sexier.

Bloggers: what is your number fetish?

Where To?

Work: PM therapy/EVE rain.
Report: Jumps & exercises relocated around the field, per plan. Now I just have to get my a. in g. early enough to fit in two sessions each day. Daylight Saving Time should help. [BTW, DST is run by the DOT, of all people.]

Ramblings for the Day: Self-help gurus and other professional befrienders are all about writing down & sharing one’s goals. My overall goal remains as it was before Rodney ever set hoof on the property: win the USEA Training Level American Eventing Championships [see post August 2010]. To which I would add, a USDF Bronze Medal and Adult Jumpers at the National Horse Show at the Kentucky Horse Park. No point in dreaming small.

My intermediate steps:
1) Saunter quietly & relaxedly around the pasture on a leadrope.
2) As above, under saddle. This is the miracle step. I think if we can get this far, the rest will fall gradually into place. Mind you there will still be fireworks, backsliding, and hysteria from both parties. He’ll still be a TB and I’ll still be me. 2b) Start jogging & hillwork in hand.
3) Be able to do ringwork. Switch fitness work to undersaddle.
4) Do enough ringwork to take lessons at home.
5) Ship to lessons, xc schools, schooling shows. Day shows are local hunter/jumper & unrecognized dressage.
6) Bigger shows, weekend competitions. Even a Baby Novice proof-of-concept outing requires a weekend.
7) Go to the AEC, win the AEC. Look back in awe & wonderment.
Right now, I would be thrilled beyond words to throw on a saddle for a mosey around the field. I think that would even hold me – at least for a while.

Despite my gloom & doom this winter, I still see room for progress. I want to see what he is like on meds, during the warm weather, with consistent groundwork. If the situation has not changed come October, the wallowing will be epic.

What are your equine goals?