It’s here, gang! Hagridden has a cover!
I love everything about this, including the stuff you can’t see, by which I mean the conversations between me and the publisher as we looked at drafts of this. But my favorite bit: the clean font + distressed look = exactly the right combination of the book’s literary seriousness and gritty violence.
And I love this really spooky and mysterious lamplit wood, the heavy grain of which seems to evokes the rough wood of both Buford’s house and Clovis’s shack-like shop, but there’s also a kind of vague suggestion of the dense reeds that form the women’s palmetto house.
It’s a perfect image made all the more perfect because it’s just a suggestion, a glimpse in the dim light.
Of course, I’m biased. You’re the reader. What do you think? How do you like the cover here?
Samuel Snoek-Brown 
Cool cover.
I see so many terribly photoshopped covers but yours is nicely done.
Thanks so much! I really think the team at Columbus Press did a bang-up job on this — they captured the mood and feel of the book perfectly. But I know the book, so I’m especially pleased to know it works on its own — that someone unfamiliar with the story still digs the cover. Really appreciate your feedback!
It’s a totally cool concept. Maybe it’s the reproduction here, but I don’t see much of ‘lamplit wood’ or ‘heavy grain’ except for a little highlight to the right-hand side.
My only worry, for your sake, about such a minimalist cover is that it will not matter to those of you who already know the excellence of your writing, but it will not necessarily catch the eye of people who don’t.
Yeah, the early drafts of this were hard to see because the little spotlight of wood of the right was dimmer and smaller. But I discovered that it was also harder to see because I keep my computer screen fairly dim and because of the ambient light reflections. In other words, it’s not the cover, it’s the digital medium. 🙂
Yes, I suspected it was a reproduction effect. The worry is that a heck of a lot more might be lost on, say, and Amazon thumbnail.
-and +an