One of the “author” questions that people - friends, family, sometimes those good souls who come and listen to me talk about the things I write - ask me the most is how much say I have in the covers of my books. The answer (some, but not much) often surprises people. “But it’s your book!”, they reply. To which I respond: “Yes, and I just do the words.”

It takes a village to make a book. It was this, Gabrielle Zevin told me, that she was trying to honour in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: all the people in publishing whose often invisible work (to the reader, at least) goes into editing, packaging, marketing, publicising, printing, selling and stocking the thing. The words are where it all starts, but the words are also a pretty small part in the grand scheme of things. Those people are all experts in knowing how to make a book look nice on a shelf, or stand out in a shop, or stop someone from scrolling on Instagram. I am not. This is why my opinion on what my book looks like should matter less than those people who are paid to think about it. It’s also why, when someone says, “Gosh, it’s beautiful” about my book cover I feel awkward saying “thank you” rather than “isn’t it, though?” As if we were admiring a particularly handsome dog that I happened to be walking at the time.

Writing and releasing a book is often more weird, humdrum, boring and admin-orientated than a lot of people think, but the fact that people make pictures to match your words remains persistently special. So I’m chuffed that Rafi Romaya, the Art Director of Canongate and the designer behind both Rootbound and Why Women Grow’s gorgeous hardback editions agreed to do an interview with me for this week’s newsletter. I learned so much from this, and I hope you do too.

AV: I think book cover design is a mystifying world even for those of us involved in publishing; would you be kind enough to explain a little about how your job works and what stages a book cover might go through before people are able to buy it and cherish it at home?

RR: For the Art Department, the cover process begins in the jacket meeting, when the editor briefs the book by pitching it back to the team. A typical brief will contain information such as title, sub-title, possible quotes, and also the hierarchy of the text; next a summary of the book and supply any reading material available; information about the author; where the book will sit with in the very busy publishing landscape; who we envisage the main retailers will be; which books already published readers of this book might like and finally, possible cover comps for visual inspiration. The meeting is attended by someone from each department – Editorial, Sales, Campaigns and of course, Design, so everyone has an opportunity to feed into the brief before we start designing.

Once briefed, I start reading whatever material I can – to me, the cover is a visual interpretation of the book and to some level the author and the publisher. I still like to read a printed manuscript so I can scribble ideas/thumbnails in the margins. This also helps indicate to me if different themes become motifs, what characters may look like etc and I often pull out one sentence or paragraph to base the cover on as it’s important not to tell the whole story on the cover and instead tempt readers in. Once I have the idea, it’s then a question of how to render it. This partly comes down to who the possible reader might be and how it fits within the market as well as the book itself and the reading experience. Sometimes, it’s photographic, or illustration, or a new commission or something I create myself – all of which can be rewarding in different ways.

Visuals are then shared in the jacket meeting and once we have a cover we all love, it goes to the author for their feedback and hopefully approval.

How did the process for creating the cover for Why Women Grow begin?

As above, it started with the manuscript, but I also had the mood board you sent over in my mind as I was reading. Also, as I’d designed Rootbound, I also had a reference point of you as a writer and where you were in your career. I love both books, but with WWG, it felt like you’d matured, and I wanted the cover to reflect that.

Lots of people ask me if I get a say in the cover, and because you lot at Canongate are lovely I absolutely do - but I'd love to hear about this from your perspective. How does it feel when an author, ostensibly a words person, has an input on something so visual? 

Good question! I think this is where communication and trust comes in. Your mood board­­ was full of beautiful images, so I had a sense of the tone and feel you wanted. If you wanted to be reductive then someone could argue that WWG is essentially a black cover with a bunch of flowers on it, but the way it’s rendered and the jacket executed, it hopefully takes it to another level, something that’s not easy to articulate in words alone.

I was really pleased to be able to give you a brief for the cover, and loved the direction you took with that. What sort of places did you look to for inspiration and what ideas did that cover?

The brief contained a lot of vintage images so I began the search using the great archives of Bridgeman and the V&A Museum which both hold the most incredible collections and would inspire anybody. I then looked for new, female artists that specialised in horticultural illustration.

Ultimately, we went with something I never expected and now, as ever, feels totally right. What prompted the shift to black and using Vasilia Romanenko's work? 

One of the themes of the books was how gardening can take you from a dark place into the light and how it can nourish and restore you to flourish, along with the plants. To me, these beautiful flowers appearing out of the darkness echoed that and I added the butterfly from another of Vasillia’s paintings to signal life renewing.

I also wanted to use a female artist as this book is all women. Vasilia’s work is beautiful. I loved that it was a painting that will have taken time to create as so much in WWG is about time and timings. It was serendipity that it included the Damask rose mentioned in the book. Also, I wanted to use a found object if possible. Using the painting as a book cover gave it a second life, as gardens can us in restoring us and vice versa.

Can we please talk about these delicious endpapers, I am obsessed. 

They’re another amazing painting by Vasillia. I wanted to show the darker side of gardening – the thorniness, the rawness – and surprise the reader, giving the book a physicality, making it something you want to hold and admire. And I liked the evolution to have more of the flowers in bloom by the end of the book, to give a sense of something having flourished.

Finally, what other book covers do you love? Anything you've seen recently or uphold in your collection as all time greats, I'd love to know.

Oh, gosh. This is the hardest question as it changes all the time. There are so many good book covers out there! Only today I was looking at a selection of the best cover designs from the past 10 years as voted for by the ABCD Awards and loved so many of them, so I’m not sure I have one favourite book cover. I love the work of Alvin Lustig, but if I name a living designer I may offend so many of my friends!

Thank you Rafi! You’re the best.