Book Cover: Blackbird Whistling

Blackbird Whistling is the second book in a duology written by Dian Greenwood. Book number one was Forever Blackbirds, and I had the privilege of not only watching that book come to life over many years in our writing group, but designing the cover and interior for its spring 2024 publication. I wrote about the process of creating the cover here.

Back when we were in writing group together, Dian was writing one story, but that one story morphed into two over time. I knew when I offered to design Forever Blackbirds that I'd get to come back and design Blackbird Whistling as well, and now, here I am! It's been so lovely to delve into the story of Marta Gottlieb again, and to take the design we came up with for her story and extend it into the next generation.

With a series of any kind, whether there are two or twenty books in it, you want a consistent look. When it came time to start on book two, I went back to book one for my first inspiration.

And as I had with the first book, I let Dian be my guide. With some projects, I do the concepting on my own before bringing in the author or publisher or client, and with some I let them take the lead. Sometimes it's somewhere in the middle. I asked Dian what she was picturing for this second cover, and she said (with some helpful input from fellow writer Judy Reeves) she was interested in focusing on a landscape again, bringing the blackbird (or blackbirds) back, and adding a new element: gravestones. And in particular the wrought-iron crosses that are prevalent in the part of North Dakota where a lot of Dian's saga takes place. Some info on them is here.

The first thing I did was go on the hunt for wrought-iron crosses. It was difficult to find ones that were royalty free and that we both thought would work. 

When I found something we liked, it came courtesy of Jo Naylor on Flickr Creative Commons. Here's a quick side-note. Just now when I dipped into my files to get this credit, I found I hadn't adequately labeled the original photo. I was pretty sure it had come from Flickr and I was pretty sure of the photographer's name, but when I went to the site and tried to search the original file name, nothing came up. I tried to google the file name. Nothing came up. I went into a bit of a panic because what if the photo I used for this cover was not a free use photo at all? Could I have made that mistake? This led me to a two-hour search, page by page, through her photostream until I found the picture again. But during that search, I found out that the photographer, too, is a book cover designer and writer. Here's her website if you want to check her out.

The next step after finding a photo to work with was to photoshop out the background to isolate the two wrought iron crosses (see the little one behind?). Then I assembled a few very early samples to get us going. In most of the samples I'll share in this post, the iron crosses are going to stick out unnaturally against the background. That's because it took a while to choose our landscape and I didn't want to tinker with the crosses to integrate them until we had officially decided what that landscape was.

I started, actually, with the landscape from book one. The original image for that cover was quite wide, which allowed me to use a completely different portion of it for this early prototype. I liked the idea of the two books being able to sit side by side and show that they take place in the same terrain. I brought back the type treatment from book one as well and gave Dian a few examples of how we might add the crosses to the meadow (she explained that these crosses can be found scattered in fields, not just bunched up in cemeteries). For blackbirds, Dian was interested in a flock flying in the sky, so I found and added those as well.

The original title of book two was Safekeeping. Which is not a monstrously long word as is, but bringing back the style with the big, sweeping first letter made our title smallish on the page, so I also experimented with breaking Safekeeping into two, which is a convention that is often used on book covers.

Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention, which you can see in these samples, is that after I photoshopped the background from my crosses, I extracted the smaller cross and photoshopped it into a completely separated cross so that I could move it around.

Then looking around for usable imagery, I came across a gorgeous picture of a songbird perched on a dying flower. On impulse I grabbed it and added it to my early design and sent a couple more samples. I loved Dian's direction of the field and crosses and sky with birds, but I worried that it needed something more.

I sent my samples to Dian and to publisher Laura Stanfill. Together, the three of us made up the team that was going to be helping birth this book. Dian liked the bird idea but wanted a blackbird, to be more in keeping with the story. She wondered about putting the bird on a gravestone rather than a flower and was interested in finding a sky that wasn't as dark and foreboding. She wanted more gravestones, more of a proper cemetery in the field. 

Side-note: it can take a long time to find just the images you want to use. You think, okay, I'll search cemetery. And then you get loads of closeups of young models draped theatrically across headstones, dressed like vampires.

I tried some new samples with different skies, more gravestones, a couple different blackbirds I found. All of these samples were rough with the gravestones sometimes floating on the field because, again, I wanted to pin down a layout before going in for the detail-work.

Laura had some great feedback that we might want to keep the crosses small enough in the frame that their names aren't readable, out of respect for the families of whoever was buried there. Dian was interested in finding a different bird and a sky that was more serene. The bird I had the most in my samples was probably a baby, very fluffy and unkempt. I went back to look for a blackbird that everyone would love. I was unhappy with landscapes I had found thus far. As I said about my cemetery search, a lot of this project was me sifting through hundreds of photographs looking for the perfect images, images that would show what we wanted to show, balance nicely in the frame, integrate well into the scene, and not have copyright issues. That last one is very important, and narrows down the places you can find images by a lot. Even so, you always think it will be easier to find the right images to work with. Sometimes it takes forever.

During that forever, we had a bit of an update. The title of the book changed from Safekeeping to Blackbird Whistling. All the more reason to find the perfect blackbird for our cover. I searched through photos of birds, skies, landscapes. When I found what we liked, I worked to integrate it all. The final step was Dian's suggestion to change the secondary text (the blurb and "a novel") from the peachy color I'd been using in my most recent samples (a color that came from the shoulder of the new blackbird) to pink. And we finally had our cover.

I love that sweet blackbird!

Blackbird Whistling comes out in just one month! September 2. Dian has a launch event at Broadway Books in Portland on September 10, with conversation partner Joanna Rose. More info about Dian and all her books is on her website here. And here's a tiny taste from the book.

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Angus takes me back to a time when farmers like Great granduncle Herman had all those kids in order to work the farm. An era when folks abided by faithfulness to farm, family, and God. All decisions were based on what was best for the crops, the farm, and the overall good of the family. When young people fell in love and married, they were expected to adhere to the same rules. The way I’ve lived my life and Jennifer is living here—taking off with her grandmother on what could be seen as a harebrained adventure—stands outside their code of conduct. College and living away from the family home is likely contrary to what’s acceptable. Angus, however, is a century past due in terms of picking up the plow and hitching the harrow. . . following a long succession of family who worked this land, living and dying here.