Please judge this book by its cover.

This is it, the official cover and publication date reveal for my debut novel BE WELL.

For the longest time, I thought I was someone who didn’t care what a book’s cover looked like. Readers only care about what’s inside, right?

That was before I wrote a book, queried agents, signed with an agent, got a publishing deal, and then subsequently had to figure out a book cover.

The good news is: my debut novel BE WELL has a cover now! I’m going to reveal it to you in this newsletter! Feel free to skip all other words from here and then scroll down until you see it! And then, once you do that, mark your calendar for June 23, 2026, when my book will be available to buy online and in bookstores!

Or, if you really want to be a champ, pre-order it when that link goes live in March 2026. Think of it as a little treat for your future self.

However, if you want to delay your gratification and stick around for a little longer, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into conceiving, designing, and getting everyone to agree on a cover for your debut novel. Please note that this only reflects my experience as someone who is traditionally publishing a book with a small-but-mighty indie publishing house. The fact that I am working with a smaller publisher means that I had more creative input than most authors do, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.

The Timeline

As a reminder, here is the back jacket copy of BE WELL.

Summer 2009: Brand-new college graduate Ann Ward has sent out nearly three hundred job applications, but nobody will employ her. The last thing she wants to do is leave Los Angeles, return to her desert hometown, and live in the shadow of her fame-hungry televangelist father–and it’s starting to look like that’s her fate. Thankfully, Ann’s luck turns after a humiliating failed job interview, when she meets the magnetic founder of upscale holistic wellness collective Sagebrush. She’s quickly drawn deep into the privileged, demanding world of Sagebrush, inventing Anneliese - a dubious new persona - to fit in. But when her funds run out and her lies blow up, Ann must choose between facing reality or doing whatever she has to do in order to get the future she wants.

Both a “funny ha-ha-” and a “funny oh no” read for anyone who survived the Great Recession, Be Well explores just how easy it is to believe in something unquestioningly–and lie to ourselves and others–when everything feels uncertain and the future isn’t guaranteed.

So that’s what we need to convey visually. Easy, right?

July 2025: My publisher, Heliotrope, sends me some initial cover designs.

August 2025: My agent and I discuss the options, and agree we like one of them, and want to iterate on it.

September 2025: The extremely patient Naomi Rosenblatt at Heliotrope sends me more iterations of the cover I thought I liked. Something still doesn’t feel right. Soon, I realize I’ve only been pretending to love it, because I want everyone to be happy with me. However, this is my only chance to be a debut author so I need to love it, full stop. I talk to my agent about it, and then show a select handful of discerning reader friends/family, who offer differing opinions about why it doesn’t work. My agent then graciously emails the publisher, asking if we can try a couple more options and take things in a different direction. I go on a field trip to a bookstore with my mother-in-law, a voracious reader, to take pictures of covers that jump out at us, and discuss what really draws our eye and gets us interested.

Meanwhile, my husband works up his version of the cover in 30 seconds in Microsoft Word Art, to make me laugh.

It does have a certain early 2000s je ne sais qoui.

October 2025: I get to work in Canva Pro mocking up some cover designs, which I think are really cool. I show them to some friends, and they politely inform me that the motif reminds them of close-ups of female genitalia. Not what I was going for, so I put those aside, along with any idea that I could be a graphic designer. Naomi sends a few more cover designs, some of which are closer to what I was thinking, but still not quite there. A dear friend sketches his cover concept for me at a dim sum restaurant in San Francisco. My agent has a graphic designer contact of his work up a few cover comps. They’re good, but they don’t quite emphasize what I think is the spirit of the book. He does come up with a really kick-ass font that I fall in love with, and that gets some ideas churning in my head.

November 2025: After a failed attempt at a cover that involves a hand holding a crystal (it looks too much like the Twilight covers, IMO) Naomi reminds me that any photos I have taken are fair game. I quickly run out and buy multiple crystals from a store called (I kid you not) Dirt Cheap Crystals. I take photos of them in various layouts and send them to Naomi with extremely specific ideas of colors, placement, fonts, etc. and hope for the best.

Thanksgiving Week 2025: Naomi emails me with a few more comps. One of them immediately goes Top Gun and takes my breath away. This is it. I rejoice, finally having felt the feeling I was hoping for this whole time. We make it final and celebrate the end of this long, drawn-out creative process.

Oh by the way, here’s that cover.

Isn’t it beautiful?

The mold (or is it blood?) spattered drywall effect in the title font, the photo-negative crystals, the background color: all of it is based on the exact design choices that would make me look closer at a book I’d never heard of while browsing in a bookstore. It perfectly captures the “cutesy woo-woo but ominous” vibe I’m going for with BE WELL. I’ll be proud to have stacks of books with this cover in my house, blown up on posters at events, and generally living rent-free in my head for the next six months.

And you know damn well I am going to paint my nails in these theme colors during the week of June 23, 2026.