Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Book Cover for Barefoot Girls!


My wonderful and incredibly talented cover designer, Mimi Bark, has completed the ebook cover design for Barefoot Girls and I am madly in love with it! Isn’t it bee-you-tee-ful??? Mimi, you are amazing!

It achieves exactly what I wanted the cover to do – to spark memories of carefree summer days as well as communicate the feeling of Captain’s Island, the setting of the majority of the book. Captain’s is a fictional composite of several islands out on Long Island, New York, but the island that inspired it most was Oak Island, the island where I spent the summers of my youth.

The way the cover captures Captain’s is with the inclusion of the dock where the little girl is sitting. Captain’s Island is in the Great South Bay and, like most islands there, the dominant places to play and entertain are the docks and the long boardwalk (also made of wood) that connects the houses - there are no roads. The docks that stretch out in front of each house have well-used diving boards and ladders, flagpoles with stars and stripes snapping away at the top, the occasional lawn-chair for sunbathers, bobbing moored boats, and plenty of activity all day long.

Or sometimes, you just sit, like the girl on the cover, feet dangling in the water and watching the boats go by, giving the water a kick occasionally to watch the droplets make expanding circles on the surface. When I first heard Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” as a little girl, I thought
the song was about Oak Island. It had to be! That’s where you sat and watched the tide roll away, wasn’t it?

Very excited to see cover of Barefoot Girls – it makes this whole amazing business of being published feel more real and less like some crazy vivid dream. My book will someday be held in a reader’s hands and they will gaze upon this cover before opening it and beginning to read…

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