Ali Mercer

Writer

Tag: cover

The new cover of After I Left You

by Leave a comment

cover of After I Left You

After I Left You has a new look! This is the cover design for the paperback, which is due out at the end of July.

I hope you like it. I think it’s a beauty, and captures perfectly a certain kind of sunny afternoon, and the feeling of being free and happy in a golden place and time.

I have this song by George Ezra on the brain at the moment, and the lyrics seem at least partly apt: ‘Give me one good reason why I should never make a change…’

It’s interesting how cover designs can change over time. The initial cover for my first book, Stop the Clock, featured three pairs of legs, representing the three different characters; the career woman, the uber-mum, and the unassuming girl-next-door. This was good fun for me, as I got to help draw up the prop shopping list. In the end, though, it hit the shelves with a quite different look – the lady sipping coffee, reading her newspaper (probably checking out the column written by Tina, the career woman, which causes all sorts of problems when her friends think she is writing about them.)

Sometimes covers even feed into a book. There’s a scene in Julie Cohen’s excellent Dear Thing that involves a pair of baby shoes. Julie mentioned that she put the baby shoes into the book after she’d seen the cover design for the hardback, which featured someone holding a pair – it was too good a metaphor to miss!

BIG thank you to everyone who has said kind things about the cover of After I Left You – here are some of the comments – and thank you so much to everyone who has shared it. The response has been lovely and I’m really grateful.

 

The cover of After I Left You

by Leave a comment
After I Left You cover
The cover of After I Left You

Here it is – the cover of my new book, After I Left You, due out in Jan 2014 from Black Swan.

I’ve posted it on Twitter and Facebook and have had a really lovely response – even the chaps seem to like it! I appreciate this so much, as this is a peculiarly, irrationally nerve-racking moment. It’s the tipping point at which the book begins to shift definitively from being mine − something that sits quietly on my computer − to being yours (I hope), in your hands. It’s not quite the top of the helter-skelter ride that is publication; that will come in January next year – but it’s well on the way up.

Lisa Horton, the designer, has put a lot of thought and ingenuity into this cover. You can see Oxford in the background, and that’s perfect because that’s where a lot of the story is set, and where the lovers met back in the day. And you can see straight away that all hasn’t turned out blissfully well for these two – well, for most university couples it doesn’t, does it? But who knows, maybe that could change…

I really love the torn photo in this design. It makes me think of a box I have tucked away that has various bits and pieces of memorabilia in it: 20-year-old letters, postcards, and yes, a few photos. I have a hunch that most women have an equivalent to that box somewhere. (Men too?) I don’t look in it, but I know it’s there, like a time capsule.

(The box that Tina uses for Justin’s letters in Stop the Clock is the same kind of thing, but doesn’t quite manage to stay out of sight – I won’t say any more about that though, in case you haven’t read it. Spoilers are BAD, as my husband recently reminded me when I dropped a clanger about Game of Thrones.)

Here’s the copy my editor at Transworld, Harriet Bourton, has written to introduce After I Left You: 

Every broken heart has a history

Anna hasn’t been back to Oxford since her last summer at university, seventeen years ago. She tries not to think about her time there, or the tightly knit group of friends she once thought would be hers forever. She has almost forgotten the sting of betrayal, the heartache, the secret she carries around with her, the last night she spent with them all.

Then a chance meeting on a rainy day in London brings her past tumbling back into her present, and Anna is faced with the memories of that summer and the people she left behind. As Anna realises that the events of their past have shaped the people they’ve all become, hope begins to blossom for what her future could hold…

An absorbing, powerful novel of love and friendship that will sweep you away

from the very first page.

Praise for Alison Mercer’s debut novel, Stop the Clock

‘This is grown-up chick-lit at its very best’ Closer

‘Funny and moving, this is a fab debut’ new!

‘Mercer has a satirical eye which she puts to good effect . . . A funny, promising debut’ Daily Mail

After I Left You is available for pre-order from the publisher, Transworld.

More about After I Left You

The cover of Stop the Clock

by Leave a comment

Here’s the final cover of Stop the Clock, my debut novel, which is due to be published on August 16. Let the printing presses roll!

I really hope everybody likes it… I think it’s a beauty. You know that moment when you finally make it to the café, and get to sit down with your cappuccino and have a read? (For me it would probably be a latte, a chocolate brownie and The Fear Index by Robert Harris, which is what I’m reading at the moment.)

It’s just such a luxury: that little bit of time. That’s what this image makes me think of. Also, I like her pink nail varnish!

My other half tells me that in France, they have historically had a quite different attitude to the whole business of covers, and been quite high-minded and gone in for plain white with a title on – though apparently this is beginning to change. Personally, I think the cover is part of the fun of owning the book. Here’s a shortlist of five other covers I really like – you’ll probably remember them, because they’re all the sort that stick in your mind:

  1. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding – the slightly sepia-tinted chick with the curls and the fag
  2. One Day by David Nicholls – so good! The silhouette of the lovers’ profiles
  3. Riders by Jilly Cooper – a model behind looking very fetching in white jodhpurs
  4. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger – the red high heel turning into a devilish trident
  5. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières – anyone who was in London in the mid 90s will remember when this jolly blue-and-white cover, which looks like a naive painting, was absolutely everywhere on the Tube.

The cover of my other first novel, which I wrote when I was at primary school, has suffered a bit from the passage of time, but you can still just about make it out – here it is!

the cover of my other first novel