Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover
Don’t judge a book by its cover. We’ve had that drilled into us—at least my generation did, and, to a large extent, we believed it—I believed and I still do. At least as far as people go. And dogs—you ever meet a dog who looks mean and you want to step back but then he approaches you gently and licks your hand? Anyway, never judge a book by its cover, unless of course, it is a book . I’ve been thinking about covers a lot lately. It started when we released Vampire Rising , my allegorical Vampire novella. It pays homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula while reinventing the Vampire genre. In the story I tell there were certain elements that helped tell the story—mockingbirds who appear wherever Vampires gather, the iron gates that demarcates the separation between the Vampire state and the human world. And the story is described in grays and purples. So I wanted to include all of those elements that in the cover. The Original Cover When my publisher notified me that they wou...