Every day this week, we have been taking you behind the scenes of I Survived with author Lauren Tarshis and editor Nancy Mercado as they gave you the inside scoop on how the latest book in the New York Times bestselling series was created. Today, Nancy Mercado takes one last look behind the scenes talking about the creation of each book's cover.
JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER by Nancy Mercado
The great thing about working on an established series is that the covers all have a similar look that readers will recognize, so the process of creating the cover can be pretty straightforward. Notice I didn’t say easy! So what goes on behind the scenes of an I Survived cover? First, the designer of the series, Yaffa Jaskoll, contacts the illustrator Steve Stone who has worked on every book in the I Survived series and sends him a general summary of the book, the time period, and a description of the main character and what he should be wearing.
I work so far in advance on the cover, most of the time we don’t have a finished manuscript to share with Steve, so he has to go on our summary of the book.
In the case of the Chicago Fire book, we decided that the cover should feature the main character in a boat as he’s escaping the fire. That meant that Lauren had to be sure to keep the scene where Oscar is in a boat otherwise our cover image wouldn’t make much sense!
Then, Steve sends over some possible models that he’d like to use. Every book in the series so far has featured an eleven-year-old boy, so Steve and Yaffa look for boys who are in that age range, and who match the description of Lauren’s main character. Fun fact: They have never used the same model twice, so every cover features someone new.
Once Steve has completed his photo shoot, he sends us some sample images and Yaffa decides which one will work best with the design. We love how realistic Steve’s work is, and how he puts the main character right in the center of the disaster in a way that feels immediate, terrifying, and true to life.
Yaffa also tries to keep in mind how the cover will look when it’s seen with all of the rest of the books in the series, and she works hard to make sure that they look different enough, both in the colors that are chosen and in the pose of the model. Here are all of the I Survived covers at a glance. Do you have a preference for one over the other? Why?
To read all of the I Survived Behind-the-Scenes posts, click here.
About the author:
Lauren Tarshis is the editor of Scholastic's Storyworks magazine and group editorial director for language arts for Scholastic classroom magazines, in addition to being the author of the I Survived series and the critically acclaimed novels Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree and Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell in Love. She lives in Westport, Connecticut, and can be found online at www.laurentarshis.com.
Want to learn more? Watch this video about how Lauren got the idea for the I Survived series and this one about the differences between writing for a magazing and a book.
For additional classroom resources, visit www.scholastic.com/TeachISurvived.
Author photo © David Dreyfuss.
