Today marks THREE WEEKS until While You’re Asleep hits bookshelves. I’ve got so many fun things to share and I’m practically bursting at the seams as I wait for thsi book to hit bookshelves. I love it so!
I thought today I could share what’s not in the book.
The Cover
Covers can be tricky. We mock up a bunch of options and those options get taken to meetings and then our editor and art director relay notes/direction. It’s a smooth process, but the tricky part for me has always been what to give away/how to sum up the story and allure folks to pick it up. There’s a formula to it, for sure. I start with some digital options …
The book is all about the juxtaposition of the classic vibe of the saccharine sleepy animals and the wakeful, humorous shenanigans of nocturnal animals. Looking through the options I presented, you can see how much I fought the idea of featuring the wakeful animals on the cover from the very beginning. I don’t know, I guess I thought that was a major spoiler? At this point it seems silly not to include them … Grateful for a team with patience and perseverance to convince me of the things I cannot see in the moment!
Very glad where we landed …
Moths
The first thing I did after I wrote the first draft, was paint a bunch of moths. I was obsessively painting SO MANY MOTHS.
I painted this scene and then added a spread into the manuscript that would be a gatefold zooming in on this party within a party. It ended up getting scrapped because it wasn’t working with the flow of the final act. I was glad to see it go. As this is a bedtime book, I opted for a trim size that would stretch across the lap of a kid and and an adult reader—the coziest bedtime book cuddle. And including a gatefold situation just seemed chaotic.
BUT! The moths were not scrapped entirely. There are a few in the interior, and then you’ll find some at the end of the book in the dedication.
Night-blooming flowers
I love diving deep into a rabbit hole of a very specific obsession. Early on in the revision process, the notion of night-blooming flowers felt like a great thing to embrace into the body of the story. I spend days researching and sketching and trying to figure out how to fit them into the story. It quickly felt complicated and confusing. So then I decided it would just be part of the visual story. We brainstormed how to delineate visually between the sleeping and wakeful animals. In the book, the sleeping animals are tucked within borders, while the wakeful animals are bursting out of them. It felt like a great spot to include my night-blooming flowers.
They had little faces initially, and I played around with how those borders would look, ultimately landing on a more simple approach.
And you’ll find the flowers on the endpapers too!
Random Snippets
And there’s just random stuff that gets shifted throughout the process.
The bear was initially brown …
… the crickets were green …
… and this spread just didn’t work.
And since you read this far, a gift for you: my bat-obsessed daughter making me wear her bat ears (from her Mega Bat costume) while showing them proofs at bedtime.
REMINDERS!
You can pre-order the book from my local indie, Bookbug, and get a cute door hanger!
And when you order the exclusive Barnes & Noble edition, you get a poster!
And there are lots of events coming up! Join me to celebrate this book sooooon!
Love being at your book reading/signing at Barnes & Noble bookstores! Your drawings are so full of life and brought a smile to my granddaughters face! We’ve been growing up on your nerdy babies book and she loves the Fall book and now this one! Thanks for sharing your talents with the world!!
The Moth Ball!! 😍