Cover Me

From Matt:

There’s a scene in our book in which the sheriff goes into Moody’s Diner, opens the breakfast menu and can’t make a selection. The blueberry pancakes? The cheesy scramble? The French toast with whipped cream?

Everything looks so damn good!

We had a similar problem choosing a book cover. Our Koehler Books designer, Suzanne Bradshaw, gave us five options and we had to winnow that to two. It wasn’t easy. Not only were the designs fantastic, they were all unique with each one hitting on a different theme in the novel.

And we have a lot of themes, which we laid out to Suzanne in our introductory meeting.

At its core, Muddy the Water is a detective novel – Detective Grimes tries to solve the murder of her best friend. But it also examines the world of a small newspaper, and it takes place along the vibrant and beautiful South Carolina coast. It’s about subterfuge and camouflaging yourself, and octopuses – another visually striking element – are a recurring theme. At one point we wondered if the title should be “Murder, Ink,” a play on newspapers, octopuses, a character’s prominent tattoo and the seminal act of the novel.

You can see those themes in the five choices:

This was the most gorgeous of the five covers with the words “Muddy the Water” jumping off the page. We’d told Suzanne we liked the cover of “Where the Crawdads Sing” in that it was beautiful and seemed to be inviting the reader into a little-known world. This one had a similar vibe and it’s a sensation our main character, Ben, experiences in the book. He grew up in Northern New England and is blown away by how lush – and alive – everything is in The Lowcountry. But we had a worry: Was it sinister enough for a crime thriller?

This one did the best job conveying all the layers in the book, and it really hit the octopus theme. As a birdwatcher, I didn’t love that there were a pair of sandhill cranes (not a common bird in South Carolina) in flight on the cover, but that would have been an easy fix. (Just change it to pelicans. Voila!). This one seemed to be popular with the younger people we surveyed.

There’s depth to this one. It incorporated newspapers more than any other design and signals to prospective readers the detective work inside. There’s also a splotch – Mud? Blood? – in the background and the vertical title made it unique among the candidates.

I’ll be honest: This was my favorite when I made my first pass at the choices. The shadow in the water provides an element of menace and we liked the way the title receded into the marsh grass. We weren’t sure about the tentacles and worried they gave it a Sci Fi feel. But that, too, would have been easy to remove.

This has the crime vibe we were going for. I like Southern Noir fiction and this looks like the cover that would go with a Daniel Woodrell or Tom Franklin novel. We wondered if red droplets would be a turnoff for some readers, so Suzanne lowered the opacity to make it more ambiguous as to whether it’s ink, mud or blood. 

How did we arrive at our choice?

I can tell you that some other elements of the book required a lot of discussion, weeks of campaigning and a bombardment of early-morning texts (Jess was the bomber, I was the bombee) .The title, for instance, had many iterations. For years it was “Deadline,” but we eventually decided that was too generic. So we considered alternates like “Inked,” “A Crooked Path” and “Murder, He Wrote.” (That last one was submitted by our dad. Clever guy). Finally, we settled on “Muddy,” which we’ve both come to love.

We agreed early on as far as our antagonist’s name, Ben Bracken, which is alliterative and which suits his character. A bracken is a coarse fern that's hardy and hard to eradicate. But late in the process we were crushed to learn there’s a character in a U.K. series with the same name, which prompted us to search for a new surname. Nothing seemed as good as Bracken, probably because we’d had it in our head for years, and we went through every “B” name known to man – Baxter, Blackwell, Brumley – before settling on Broome.

The cover was comparatively easy. We both immediately liked the first one for the reasons explained above. It simply popped. Our second choice? It came down to Nos. 4 and 5. We ultimately felt No. 5 was more sophisticated and gave us the element of danger and murkiness we were after.

After that, it went to a public vote. The poll on Koehler Books’ website got more than 850 votes, which is a healthy amount. I think you know by now which one ended up the winner. What are your thoughts about our cover choices and the ultimate winner? Please share here.