Have you been out today?

So, a good while after I drew the various thumbnail ideas that I posted a while back, there was a meeting with my publisher at which I would need to discuss, among other things, ideas for the cover. I was confident I could rattle off half a dozen rough designs in no time at all because I remembered how pleased I'd been with that spread of thumbnails in my sketchbook. Easy peasy. No urgency to do it now...

Only I was forgetting that in the meantime the title of the book had changed. A bunch of the previous ideas rather relied upon, or at least referred to, the previous title, (Here Is Where We Are, and didn't really work with the new title, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat. Oops. And, what's more, mostly it was the ideas that I liked best that no longer worked.

So I worked up, mostly, some new designs to send along in advance of the meeting.

Here's the first...



...which could have been okay, I think.

Incidentally, I write this having yesterday completed a new cover for the US edition of the book. The American arm of Random House wussed out of (or, perhaps, had the good commercial sense to avoid) going with the daringly minimal UK design. I'm very happy with both versions.