Ta da!  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

I’m so pleased with the cover of my new poetry collection and I thought some might be interested in what it takes to come up with such a thing of beauty.
* First we had a theoretical discussion about the theme.  What is the book about?  What holds it together? Was there a specific idea I had in mind while I was writing the poems and choosing which ones went in, which didn’t, and what order they’re placed in?  For me, writing is always the way to clarify thoughts and so I wrote this short blurb:
     Maiden, woman, crone – three traditional stages in the female lifespan. In Sue Guiney’s “Her Life  Collected”, these stages are re-envisioned for a modern time, examining through poetry the feminine response to love, betrayal, motherhood, art, loss and gain as it changes throughout the decades of an imagined life.
That blurb gave my publishers, Adele Ward and Mike Fortune-Wood, something to focus on, and that focus led to the idea of archetype.
* They then started to look through a collection of internet sites for images and photographs that could be used.  The images they saw plus the idea of archetype led them to cave drawings, and as it happens, caves drawings are things I have always been fascinated by.  The caves at Lescaux have long been on my list of must sees, so I was thrilled with this.  They then sent some links to me and I spent a happy few hours pouring over pictures until I chose two which I particularly liked.  I sent those back to Adele and Mike.
* Practicalities then came into play.  Mike explained that to be used as a cover image, a photo best be portrait rather than landscape, ie book-shaped.  And so he suggested we go with the image we have above — a cave painting which gives the prehistoric feeling, plus three hands which shows the three stages of life which my work portrays.  Next he chose the colour and type face of the text and found the perfect placement for it. And then, voila, we had the front cover.
* But books have two covers and so we had to turn our attention to the back.  Traditionally, the back cover has a bit about the book — the blurb which I had already written — and a quote or two about the book in particular or the author’s work in general.  Finding those was my job. First I rediscovered a quote printed in Theatreworld after my poetry play, Dreams of May, was produced.  Then I turned to the poet, Katy Evans-Bush.  Katy had worked with me earlier on to whip the manuscript into shape so that it was ready to submit.  She knew the work well, and I was thrilled that she was able to provide another quotation for the back cover, hers being the one to recommend the book itself.
And so we have the full cover, front and back:

You’ll notice other decisions which had to be made as well such as which colours to use on the back, how they need to compliment the front, how they need to run across onto the spine, the placement of the Ward Wood logo and the bar code box.
 You know, they say you can’t judge a book by its cover.  Well, when it comes to literal books and literal book covers, I’m not so sure.  A beautiful cover says a lot about the work inside it and the people who have taken the time to create it.  I’m pretty proud of the poetry, but I do believe the cover is a work of art. And it’s available now to pre-order via Pay Pal here.