When I began reading Plain Bad Heroines, I couldn’t wait to get started on designing the cover. It’s a funny and clever American Gothic novel with a queer twist, and I’d never read anything like it before.

The book takes us to 1902, at an all girl’s boarding school in Rhode Island, where students Flo and Clara are madly in love with each other, as well as completely obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane, a scandalous debut memoir. A copy of the book is found splayed in the woods near the two girls’ dead bodies after a horrific wasp attack. Within five years, The Brookhants School for Girls is closed. But not before three more people died on the property, each in a troubling way.

Finding Henry Applebee is a charming and uplifting story about unlikely friendships, the power of love, and how it’s never too late to change your life. It follows eighty-five-year-old Henry Arthur Applebee as he boards a train from London to Edinburgh, on a mission to find the woman who escaped his life decades earlier.

As this title was published initially as an e-book, I had to ensure that my designs were legible, clear, and eye-catching at thumbnail size. In terms of narrative, the brief was fairly open. It asked for the cover to be ‘emotional and uplifting’, while at the same time communicating a life-changing journey. I also had to ensure that it appeal to readers of commercial fiction and romance, as well as making it clear the novel has a slight literary leaning, too.