#september girls

I can’t believe it’s almost October.

iliveinbooks:

Ummm so I was on spotify in the “Discover ” section and…

Why is this allowed??

I’m not going to lie! Sometimes I search myself on Tumblr, because I’m vain. So what! [Disclosure: Sometimes I also Google myself, search myself on Twitter, etc.]

Anyway, I saw the above post floating around, and figured I’d answer the question, because a few people have asked me variations of it. (Including one person who sent me a very mean email accusing me of “plagiarism.”) Anyway, I hope it’s not considered too super-invasive of me to respond.

Like most authors, I wasn’t very involved in the cover design for September Girls, although I saw the cover during the design process and was really into it. I say this only because the following explanation could be wrong in some minor way, but my basic understanding of how this came to pass is this:

Erin Fitzimmons, the very talented designer for September Girls, found the image that was eventually used on the book cover on the photographer’s website, and paid for permission to use it, because it’s a very cool picture that she felt matched the book really well. I agree. (I think they airbrushed the guy’s nipple out, because you can kind of see it in the original photo, which, I like nipples, but okay!)

Presumably around the same time this was going on, someone was designing the cover for the band Savoir Adore’s album OUR NATURE, stumbled across the same photo, and had similar feelings about it. This doesn’t surprise me, because it’s a great photo.

AlthoughSeptember Girls was released in May 2013, the ARC, complete with cover, came out in October 2012, the same month as the Savoir Adore album. In other words: both of these covers were being designed over loosely the same time period, and neither designer knew about the other one. It’s a coincidence that is allowed because the photographer granted both HarperCollins and Savoir Adore the right to use the image, which is totally the right of the image owner to do. 

Incidentally, it’s actually fairly common for several books to use the same image on the cover. This is because there are big banks of stock images that designers can license for use, and certain images end up getting used multiple times by different publishers/designers. In the case of September Girls, it’s my understanding that the image was purchased directly from the photographer and not from a stock image database, but it’s functionally the same thing.

It doesn’t always work this way! There are plenty of times when a publisher will decide to shoot an entirely new image for the book cover. That was something that was considered for September Girls, but everyone liked this photograph so much that we decided just to go with it. Would Harper have made a different decision about using this image if we had known that it was also being used as an album cover? Maybe, but I doubt it. The picture works great, and since there’s not much danger of people confusing a book and a record, it doesn’t really make a difference. 

As it happens, I listened to OUR NATURE out of curiosity when someone first brought this to my attention, and I ended up buying it because it’s really good. So!

I’ve spend an unreasonable amount of time over the last few years talking with my therapist about how it seems like a bad policy to take praise and/or accolades for one’s book very seriously because if you pay attention to praise, you also sort of have to take criticism seriously too. Which is obviously not something I want to start doing any time soon. 

NONETHELESS, I’m pretty fucking thrilled that SEPTEMBER GIRLS is a finalist for the SFWA's Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and also that the book is an honoree for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, which is given to science fiction and fantasy books that “Expand or explore our understanding of gender.”

To celebrate, I'm extremely drunk right now giving away two signed hardcover editions of the book on Goodreads. You should enter the contest! 

Or you could just pre-order the paperback, which comes out in April. (That’s the new paperbook cover up there.)