TCA cover reveal (Field Trip edition)

& a peek into the cover-design process

My forthcoming novel, THE COME APART, to be published in June 2026 by Triquarterly Press, is now available for pre-order ¹(!) and has a cover (!!), which I’ve already shared on Instagram. Despite the Venn Diagram for my IG account and this newsletter likely looking a bit like this—

—I want to “reveal” the lovely cover in FIELD TRIP, too, partly because I was inspired by Courtney Maum’s recent Substack about the cover-design process, which provides an in-depth take on how the whole thing might well go if you’re working with a Big 5 publisher and an agent. The dance is a bit different with indie and university presses (like Triquarterly, the fiction imprint of Northwestern University Press), so I figured: Why not go behind-the-scenes from this corner?

Luckily, my cover designer, Morgan Krehbiel, was game to help me do this. But before we get to that, voila!

Now, for Morgan’s As to my Qs:

SF: I filled out an author form with ideas for the cover. I know it was... a hot mess, probably? Lol. Does the publisher hand this sort of thing over and say, “Here you go—do something with this!” If so, what were your thoughts upon reading my jumbled thoughts?! (Be honest!)

MK: With most of my publisher clients, I receive a cover brief with guidance on the target audience, key visuals/tone, comps, production specs, etc. to kick off the design process. So I’m almost never going in cold – the briefs are usually a collaboration between sales/marketing and editorial teams, so there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen before I ever get called in. Sometimes a brief will include notes or ideas from the author, but they are usually synthesized or contextualized by the publisher before it comes to me. For your cover, I did get some notes on potential imagery and screenshots of your Pinterest board – I love having visual references to help me interpret the written notes/direction, so thank you for that!

I could write paragraphs about the deep collaboration between editors, sales/marketing teams, publishers, and of course authors and designers that it takes to bring a cover to life. It’s a balance between a lot of sensibilities and areas of expertise. I personally appreciate seeing how an author is visualizing or thinking about their cover, even if it’s a hot mess, as it helps me understand the journey a book has been on before it arrives in my inbox.

SF: At any given time, how many book covers are you typically working on?

MK: Usually between 5-10 at a time when we’re coming up on seasonal catalog/distributor deadlines, which is a couple times a year. I do a lot of typesetting/layout work in addition to covers, so I try to have a flow of those steadier projects throughout the year, between seasonal cover influxes. The weeks leading up to a catalog deadline can be intense, and then it goes quiet as books move through production until they are ready for their full cover treatment (spine/back/flaps); and then the cycle begins again with a fresh crop.

SF: With TCA, at what point in the design process did you come up with the bird / flock / murmuration image? May I ask how you developed this image, or where you found it?

MK: The murmuration was one of the ideas communicated to me in the initial brief! I saw the vision right away and got to work sourcing images. The artwork in the final design began as a public-domain photograph of a flock of birds, which I took into my lab (aka Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator) and turned into the woodcut-style illustration that appears in the final design. My initial instinct was to go even more abstract, but I ended up really loving the clear bird forms that melt into more gestural forms, and how they relate to music notes.

SF: I was shown a few different draft cover ideas, all of which I liked, by the way, but the one we went with just seemed right. I assume this is the standard process—a few options, then we whittle down. Do you typically have a favorite of your own when you go through this process with a publisher/author? Is it often the one that’s selected (or the direction that is moved in)?

MK: Yes, that’s pretty typical. I try to deliver three distinct concepts for each project, sometimes with a few color/type variations, with the idea that one will be selected to develop further. My publisher clients usually do at least one round of internal review before sending designs along to authors, either editing my delivery down to their preferences, or asking me for revisions if we aren’t quite there yet. As a freelancer working alone, I really value this part of the process – getting feedback, problem-solving, having my work spark ideas in others that never would’ve occurred to me.

But yes. I do usually have a favorite and I actually think a lot about where I should put it in order to maximize the chances of it being selected, ha! If my fave feels super aligned with the brief, I’ll put it first so it becomes the standard the rest of the set is compared to. But if it ends up being a bit of a departure, I’ll put it later in the PDF so the team can go on the same journey I did with exploring different approaches before arriving at (what I think is) the aha moment. Here I am exposing my tricks…

Sometimes I get to a design that just feels right in the first set, which makes me feel very powerful, but usually I need a couple rounds of “hmm, not quite” to get to something that gels. There is an alchemy in the design process that I try to embrace.

SF: What, to your mind, are the strengths of our final cover for TCA?

MK: I think the primary strength is the composition: the tension between the title and byline being pinned to the top/bottom edges, combined with the swirling, forward motion of the birds. It’s almost telling a story in a way – we have the sense of things coming apart, with the text being repelled to the extreme edges of the cover, but also the birds interrupting that tension and whisking the eye along, into the journey.

The original concepts were also all in a more limited black/cream palette. A big concern I had when we introduced color was that the birds would look scary or Halloween-y in a way I really wanted to avoid. I tried a million different yellows and oranges and I think the one we landed on is also a big strength! It gives the birds an even clearer sense of transition (yellow sky = dusk/dawn, moving between night and day) while still being a little bit strange and attention-grabbing.

And it’s also just a killer title.

🥰

Songs for the week (Songs FTW!):

The new LP from Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover has accompanied me on many a walk this past week. Such gorgeous, searing, impassioned songs on What of Our Nature, which was “inspired by the life and music of Woody Guthrie.” This will be one of my top records of 2025, for sure.

Here’s some background on the real-life figure memorialized in the following song:

Thanks for reading, listening, comin’ along. If you enjoyed this field trip, please consider tapping the ❤️ button, or share it. Or both! 🤘

1. At Bookshop.org, BN.com, Amazon, and Nashville indies The Bookshop, Parnassus, and Novelette