What More Can the Design Do?
The rerelease of author Chris Fink’s first fiction short story collection includes a new cover, a new foreword, and an adaptation of the previous interior.
Using a bit of AI wizardry, and quite a bit of Photoshop clean-up, I built on a compelling stock photo to create the perfect, unique wraparound cover spread.
Design Brief
This short story collection, originally released in 2013, looks at understated aspects of the life of the rural everyman: farm implements, watering holes, dirt, sweat, and hard work. Forty Press acquired the rights and worked with author Chris Fink to rerelease the book in 2023.
Initially, we planned only to add the new foreword by Bonnie Jo Campbell; otherwise, we would be reutilizing the existing design—tweaking the table of contents and the associated ePub.
Thankfully, Chris pressed to also include a cover redesign in the project, giving us the flexibility to update both the back and front covers and create something more appropriate to the new literary releases of today’s market.
Project Core: Cover Update
The original cover by Kelly Hobkirk for Emergency Press in 2013 wasn’t bad. It just didn’t fit with an updated perspective on the book. Through discussions I had with author Chris Fink and managing editor Nick Dimassis, we realized that the ten-year-old stylized illustration failed to convey the personal, and perhaps gritty, nature of the stories. Stories of boys becoming men, equally applicable to young and old men.
Contemporary literary covers need to really grab the reader. While we wanted to avoid a nostalgic feel or an expression of “the good old days,” the stories are generally timeless. When I pressed for examples, we talked of rock-picking crews, detasseling corn, baling hay—the sorts of work that both boys and men might get in farm country, and all featured in the book’s stories. Solid, honest work.
The three initial directions we considered:
- Farmer in a dairy barn, listening to an old-fashioned radio, desperate to connect to the outside world.
- The rock-picking crew, walking the rows beside an old tractor, perhaps before a storm.
- A boy throwing a baseball into the back of a barn, playing a lonely game of catch.
Considering illustration styles, Chris is particularly fond of Thomas Hart Benton’s work from the early 1900s. But he also liked the idea of an old photo, perhaps black and white.
How to harmonize these disparate ideas… I had my work cut out for me.
New Cover Concepts
After noodling on this for a while, we regrouped, and I presented fourteen different directions, including the original. This number of cover concepts is undoubtedly excessive, but it did help me to focus the discussion around viable directions.
Five of these were considered finalists, embodying “everyday farm life” idea in several different approaches. With a few tweaks, these went out for consideration by the inner circle.
We quickly agreed on the boy leaping through the air into a swimming hole with his friends. While this scene isn’t from the book, it combines elements from two stories in the spirit of what Chris described while also offering an uplifting and engaging scene.
It also helped with another problem Chris and Forty Press faced in marketing this book: making clear that this wasn’t the Farmer’s Almanac, but a Farmer’s Almanac in the literal sense of a compilation.
Additional Cleanup
The back cover was refreshed, repurposing some of the visual elements from the first edition while reworking all the text.
Since this was a republished reprint, we did not need to make any significant changes to the interior. However, a few cleanup tasks were necessary, which I also handled: adding a new foreword, updating the table of contents, and updating the ePub.
