"In the novel, it is the jazz clubs that show her a different side of life than the safe and sheltered one she has been living. In the photo, she is leaning towards the piano, as in the novel, she must lean towards the future – at great risk..."

"Among the many reasons illustrator Margaux Motin is fabulous is that the women she draws are all long-legged and chic (like she is in real life), and they all wear aspirational shoes..."

"I had one major fear in advance of seeing cover concepts for The Wrap-Up List. The book has a romance-oriented plotline, and I have misgivings about the covers of some romance-oriented YA books..."

"As authors when you write a book you feel like it belongs to you solely, but the illustrator for your cover must tell their own story and invests the same passion for the work as you do. They are the gatekeepers to your world..."

"I told them to nix the stars. They replaced them with subway symbols - floating Fs and As and 1s and 6s. I told them 'anything that looks like it could be decorating a kid's sheets, we should lose.' So we went to a flat black..."

"I really wasn’t sure what my cover would look like. I had vague ideas of perhaps a pastoral English countryside, with maybe a castle in the background. Something pretty generic..."

"It was shot with a model of my dead mouse (Hamlet Von Schintzel) who is dressed like a Shakespearean character and is carrying a mouse skull as if he were Hamlet..."

"Online or in hard copy, I adore the cover for Slouching Toward Adulthood, but when I saw the book in stores, while I admired the cleverness of its design, I wondered if it wasn’t too quiet..."

"The book almost sold 20 years ago – the publisher at a NY house called to tell me she thought it was the most hysterical thing she’d ever read, was laughing on every page, would be taking it to sales conference that weekend to show all her editors...and then failed to buy it...."

"I don’t want to give too much away, but in many ways this scene on the cover is what everything is leading up to. Readers know pretty quickly that something happened on a snowy night..."