Behind the cover: The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club (2017)

And why a red-tailed black cockatoo never found its way into the design.

Dear Sunshiners,

Every time I do an event, at least one person will tell me how much they love the covers on my books. So do I! They have all been designed by Christa Moffitt of Christabella Designs and while there is a unified look to them, they are all distinct from each other. So I thought it might be fun and interesting to delve into the story behind each of my covers (and that includes the title for each book).

The first cover was on The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club, published by Hachette Australia in 2017 and later released in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands and Norway. In short, it’s a novel about a book club that takes place on Fairvale Station in the Northern Territory. (For those who aren’t resident in Australia, a station is essentially a very, very large farm.)

The book did not have a title for a long time. Its publisher, Rebecca Saunders, and I were trying to find something that worked with the phrase ‘red dirt’, as the novel is set near Katherine in the Northern Territory, and red dirt abounds in that part of Australia. By that time Rebecca was already an experienced publisher of commercial women’s fiction and I was also a publisher and had experience writing website content, amongst other things. So we knew what we were doing. It’s just that titles can be hard. They need to do a lot of work: representing the story that lies behind effectively enough to connect with readers, while not being reminiscent of anything else in the genre.

After weeks - months - of stagnation on the title front, Rebecca asked me what I call the novel in my head. ‘Fairvale,’ I said. I’d given the property at the heart of the story a name that was in concert with the usually ironic names given by (typically) British and European people who set up farms, properties and stations in Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ironic because the names spoke to their home countries, not Australia. The word ‘Fairvale’ popped into my mind when I was planning the novel and it stuck.

Once I told Rebecca that I called it Fairvale, she started thinking about using that word in the title. But it wasn’t until we were discussing a scene in the story one day and I said, ‘Well, that was the inaugural meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club’, that she said, ‘That’s it! That’s the title!’

It’s difficult to design a cover without a title. For one thing, you need to know how much real estate to give it (‘real estate’ is a term I use when talking about space on covers). For another, the title can very much dictate the tone of the design and palette: Warm or cool? Sinister or romantic? And so on.

Now that we had a title, Rebecca and Christa could start working on the whole look and feel of the cover. In so many ways, the title of my first book would set the tone for not only that cover but all the rest, because all the designs have flowed from that.

Choosing the flowers

Fairvale is mainly set in the Top End of Australia, which does not have summer, winter and so on. It has a wet season and a dry season. There is the build-up to the wet and whatever happens after the wet season is over. The cover needed to convey the lushness of the place and also just how tough it can be to live there, with high temperatures and a landscape that can bring a person to her knees and also leave her in raptures. I have driven 130 kilometres an hour up the Stuart Highway with fire by the side of the road, wondering if I’m meant to be on the road at all, and I’ve peered out a Greyhound bus window wondering at the colours changing in the sunset light (which is actually what inspired this novel).

Anyone who has been to the Top End knows just how much the natural world is there with you. The colours are so vivid. You feel like you’re inside a painting and also the painter. It’s magic there. The cover needed to convey that too.

Rebecca asked me if there were flowers or trees mentioned in the text - I was still writing it at this stage, and covers are often created ahead of the text being delivered. There are flora in the text, in the first chapter (you can listen to that chapter here, if you’re so inclined). Poincianas and a jacaranda; camellias, maidenhair ferns. None of these are native to Australia, but that was the point - the character of Sybil, who planted them, was from Sydney and she had little knowledge of native plants and was trying to recreate gardens she’d seen in the city. So there are poincianas on the cover as well as frangipanis. The flowers were easy.

Finding the right bird

The bird was not so straightforward.

Rebecca was keen to have a bird on the cover along with flowers and asked me what birds were native to the Top End. I said she wasn’t going to like the answer! Which was: the red-tailed black cockatoo (see image below - photo from iStock, by chameleonseye).

That’s because I knew, as someone who briefs covers (in my daily life as a publisher), that the black would be too heavy for what Rebecca had in mind. A black bird on a cover changes the whole tone of it. So she asked if there was another bird that could be used.

One of the characters, Rita, lives in Alice Springs, which is in the centre of the continent. Endemic to that region are Major Mitchell’s cockatoos. They are a pretty pink parrot (see below - photo by Chris Charles, from Unsplash) and I knew that such a bird would better lend itself to the cover design.

I said that I could work in a mention of a Major Mitchell’s cockatoo to one of Rita’s chapters. Rebecca went back to Christa and returned with cover concepts that were not far off the final. To borrow a phrase from the movie When Harry Met Sally, I knew the way you know about a good melon. We both did.

Thus the cover for The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club was created - including the line ‘Welcome to’ near the top - and it set a standard some might say others like to follow (I regularly have people pointing out to me that there are covers that resemble mine on other authors’ books, to which I say: imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). Christa won an Australian Book Designers Association award for it, as she should have, especially as we now know how influential that design has been.

For anyone who is curious, the font used in the title is Charcuterie Engraved Regular. Christa fills in the font for use on the covers, so if you go looking for it you’ll see that it’s not an exact match. I later bought the font from a foundry - as they’re known - and use it from time to time in social media assets, to tie things in to the covers.

I never grow tired of looking at my covers. Christa created something beautiful in Fairvale and she’s continued to do so with each one, although I hope you can now tell that the designs have input from several people, most notably Rebecca, who has such an astute sense of cover design. The designs are collaborations, with Christa at their core.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the cover design process. I will be posting about each novel’s cover and title, and, in two cases, about the internal illustrations. If there’s any other aspect of making books - mine or in general - you’d like to know about, please let me know in the comments.

Until next time,

Sophie x

[Cover image by hypergurl, from iStock]

What I’m reading

The Secret Year of Zara Holt by Kimberley Freeman

I cannot tell you how much I love this novel, which is a telling of the life of the late Dame Zara Bate, who was married to Prime Minister Harold Holt and widowed when he disappeared in the ocean near Portsea in Victoria in 1967. Immersed from the first page, I never want it to end.

Rachael Johns Author

and I will be interviewing Kim for our podcast, Dear Rach & Soph, so you’ll be able to find out more about the book there. The book is out now.

What I’m listening to

Forest House by Jenny Mitchell

Jenny Mitchell is a country-folk artist from Aotearoa New Zealand now resident in Melbourne. That is, resident when she is not touring with Kasey Chambers, which she’s doing a lot of this year. Jenny has just released her glorious fourth album, Forest House. There are some artists who rip your heart out of its chest then put it all back together again. Jenny has wonderful form in that department.