"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..."

Books, movies, games, Oscars, Tonys, Broadway...seems to me we need a solid knowledge of books to truly enjoy all the facets of modern media, because so many other forms of media spring from books--great books (Anna Karenina), popular books (Life of Pi), and infamous books (Fifty Shades of Grey). My problem? I just don't really like any of those books! There are books for all tastes, of course, but not all books are for all tastes. What's the "best" book you can't stand?

"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..."

Books make great movies--after all, good stories are good stories. And movies can become books. But video games? The waning decades of the 20th century brought us a whole new way to tell stories through video games. Not many games have gone from console to printed page, but The Legend of Zelda is about to, in a gorgeous edition that made top 50 lists weeks before publication. I loved playing Zelda myself, though not perhaps as much as Link does, and waiting for The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia made me wonder . . . what other games may have zapped themselves into print?

"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..."

I don’t know if this is exactly a recent trend – I’ve been seeing it for some years now – but I find it fascinating how so many new book covers feature characters with faces that have been largely cropped out of the cover. It’s as if they’ve been partially decapitated! I’ve found this particularly prevalent in romance and urban fantasy. I think I understand the reasoning behind this – readers have a specific image of the characters that they read about and by leaving much of the face off of the book cover, that image is left intact...

"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..."