Judge a Book by the Cover!

Follow Cassie at: @casacassie

Our little haven from freezing cold weather, rainy days, or just for fun: the bookstore. When you go into the aisles and peruse various titles at leisure, what do you look for? Everyone usually says: don’t judge a book by the cover. We are here to tell you to throw that notion out the window. Go ahead and judge the cover to your heart’s desire. Because, you know what? It took a long and arduous process to get there on the shelf looking stunning like that. Here to tell us more about this behind-the-scenes book cover process is the talented and amazing cover designer Cassie Gonzalez.

Tell us about yourself please:

My name is Cassidy Gonzalez. I am a book cover designer. I currently work at Penguin Random House in the Random House design department. I design adult covers. I design rom-coms, fiction, non-fiction, science fiction and fantasy.

How did you get into creating book covers?

I went to Pratt for graphic design. The summer after my junior year, I ended up getting an interview and internship at HarperCollins. It was an internship for the design department for ad promo, which is not connected to the cover design department, but most big departments will also have an ad promo for their marketing and publicity team. You download the cover files for the books that they want to make ads for. We would download the cover files and use the elements and style of the book to create assets that look like they could be part of the world of the book. I would be downloading the covers and eventually I was like: “wait, why am I doing this when I could be the one designing the covers?” So the next couple internships I applied to cover design departments. I interned at St. Martins press at McMillen, and Berkley and Putnam at Penguin Random House. Right after I graduated college I went into being a designer.

What is your favorite rom-com?

My all time favorite is When Harry Met Sally. Nothing tops our lord and savoir Miss Nora Ephron. For rom-com books, my favorite is one that I designed last year with the illustrator Casey Terpin, Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman. It’s a really amazing book. That was one where it wasn’t finished when I was working on it. I just listened to the audio book a couple weeks ago. It was really sweet and I loved it. Her second romance is coming out soon and we just finished the cover for that.

Do you judge a book by the cover?

I think most people do whether you like to claim that you don’t. It’s pretty much impossible to do that unless you’re reading manuscripts like we are because they don’t have covers yet. As a cover designer, a lot of the times, you can tell what the motivations were for the editor and the author and the team behind the book. When I am looking at a book and it has a lot of special effects, it has the foil and embossing and it has a “big book look”, you can determine how people think this book is going to do. You can glean from the cover what the editor thought the intended audience would be.It’s pretty impossible to separate the book from the cover in my opinion. Once you know how the hot dog is made you can’t unsee it.

What is the “big book look”?

It differs with what is popular and what is happening in book design right now. These days I would say book cover design has gotten bright, big, bold and a lot of large type. A lot of that has to do with online purchasing, especially since the pandemic the past few years people might not have necessarily been able to physically go to bookstores because they were closed or people were not out and about. I think that has contributed even more to the big book look, so some of it is a little literal—the book itself is big and the type is very big and it’s very bright.

How long does it take to create a book cover?

It can really vary. In general, three months, two months, from starting sketches to final art. We design the cover, and then there’s a waiting period for the rest of the book to catch up in the publishing plan, and then we’ll design the jacket. You work on the jacket for a month and then you release it and then a few weeks after that they print the book and it’s on the shelves. For Funny You Should Ask, they had assigned someone else to work on it and there were a couple of rounds with that person, and then they didn’t like the direction it was going in. They wanted to try something really different.

There aren’t too many colors on Funny You Should Ask?

It is actually printed in a really special way. When you are printing a book you have CMYK. C is cyan, magenta, yellow, and k is black. Those four colors make up every color that is printed essentially. Pantone colors are specially mixed inks that are specially mixed to look exactly like the color that it shows in the little panetone chip. A lot of the times those are neon colors or really bright colors. Certain colors don’t usually print as well, especially with red tones. For this book, we replaced the magenta plate with a special panetone color so that the colors would be super bright, especially the red and look exactly how we wanted them to. That’s the deal with panetone. If you have the exact color, then you know it’s always going to turn out that color instead of guessing what the printer is going to make the color look like. So, that’s what we did for that one and that is why it looks so good.

Favorite book covers you have created:

My favorite ever is probably The Comeback by E.L. Shen. I designed it when I worked at McMillen. The author is one of my best friends. She and I were interns together at Harper Collin’s six maybe seven years ago. She is an editor and an author, and she wrote this book. We were working together at McMillen when I designed it. It was really special to get to execute that cover and it holds a special place in my heart always.

What are some of your favorite book covers created by others:

Mostly pretty much anything that Na Kim does is gonna be awesome. She is the best book cover designer out there right now. Also, Anne Twomey. She is the creative director at Celadon, and she was my mentor when I was at McMillen. I really love all her designs and the amazing advice she gives.

Where do you find inspiration:

The cool thing about being a cover designer is you get a different assignment every time, every book is a little different. So whenever I get a book about something interesting that I don’t know about, I get to do a lot of research into the time period or the setting or the characters. I think it is really fun for each book to get to dive in to every aspect of the book. For one of my first covers I did at Random House, Neruda on the Park, it’s about a mother daughter family story about gentrification in their Dominican family. I didn’t really know anything about the Dominican community in New York, so I called up a friend of mine who is Dominican. I asked can I interview you about your experience and your family and anything visual you can think about, like restaurant signs or fliers from your neighborhood. I try to delve deeply into something if I don’t know a lot about it.

What does your creative process look like?

I feel like a lot of people feel this way: 95% panic and feeling like you’re not doing anything right, and then when you get it you’re like, “ah, okay I got it”. But for the first three rounds or whatever, you’re like: everything is terrible. I can’t do anything. Especially when I’m coming up with new concepts for the first round, every time I start working I’m like: this is awful. But it always ends up fine. I have a lot of books that I’m working on, and there’s a lot of pressure to make something really amazing and beautiful for each and every book. And obviously I want to give each book the special attention that it deserves, but it can be really hard sometimes to feel like you have to always be on top of everything.

What advice would you give aspiring book cover designers?

I feel like a lot of people don’t know that book design is a thing. A lot of people have this misconception about what it is that we do. Advice to book cover designers would be to research as much as you can about publishing, the publishing industry, and about book cover design. There’s a lot of really good blogs and websites out there that do cover round-ups of what they think is the best cover. LitHub does one every year where other cover designers vote on what they think the best cover design was. I think that one is really good. I would just say do as much research as you can. One thing I always say is that if you don’t have book covers in your portfolio (which you probably don’t if you apply to an entry level position) try and make some book covers for books that you are currently reading and enjoying—not books that you read in high school. Not childhood bedtime stories. Not The Great Gatsby. Anything that you are currently reading because it shows what your taste is, it shows that you have a handle on what is popular right now, and it can also show if you design a cover and whoever your interviewing with is like, “oh I know the person who did the cover and I really love these let me show them to you.” They’ll show them to the person that designed it. You can make connections that way. Also, ideally if you’re a cover designer or at least ideally for me I knew that I wanted to be in a department where I would enjoy the books that I worked on. I don’t think that’s a requirement that the books you are reading are to your taste. I think it makes it a lot more enjoyable for me personally when I’m working on a book that I really enjoy it. If you are making cover designs for books that are your taste and you are putting them in your portfolio, it can show art designers exactly what