Book Cover: Information Crisis

After years of research, interviews, writing, and editing, I’m pleased to share that Information Crisis: How a Better Understanding of Science Can Help Us Face the Greatest Problems of Our Time has moved into production and will be published in April 2024. You can read the book description here.

Now come the fun parts, starting with the cover reveal. Ta da!

Pithy sayings aside, readers do judge a book by its cover, which makes the cover a critical piece of the marketing package. Typically, a publisher hires a graphic designer to create a book cover, and the author may or may not have any input on the design.

My process is different from traditional publishers’. I’ve always created my own book covers, with my photography serving as a primary design element.

My graphic design experience harkens back to elementary school, when I first opened a business designing stationery using Print Shop software, which I sold to my family at exorbitant prices. I’ve since designed all manner of wedding invitations, birth announcements, and holiday cards for clients. For me, graphic design is a calming escape from writing that exercises my creativity in an entirely different way.

Designing my own book covers gives me the opportunity to help shape a potential reader’s first impression. After pouring years of work into a book, it feels like a weighty but worthwhile task.

Conceptualizing a cover for Information Crisis was challenging, because the book explores such a large range of subjects. I didn’t want to limit readers’ initial perceptions by choosing a cover that emphasized just one of the many themes the book addresses, nor did I want a cover so abstract that it might not make a clear connection to any of them.

Instead, I decided to pull from two separate anecdotes in the book to create the central image.

In one of these narratives, I use my family’s love of searching for fossil shark teeth on Topsail Island, NC, to illustrate how our brains use shortcuts to simplify incoming information. For example: black + shiny + triangular = shark tooth. These shortcuts are crucial for making snap decisions, but they can also skew our perceptions of the world by conjuring patterns that don’t exist, like turning a blackened piece of driftwood into a Great White tooth. The book traces how a variety of players across society commonly prey on our numerous brain processing shortcuts to distort our understanding of scientific information for their own gain—and how we can protect ourselves.

In the second narrative, which comes toward the end of the book, I introduce the joy and value of participating in citizen science by documenting my own adventure on a shark-tagging trip in Miami’s Biscayne Bay.

To make the cover image, I asked my daughter, Cricket, to draw an outline of a hammerhead shark. It was meaningful that Cricket participated in the cover creation, because, as you’ll soon read, she stars in the book as a tiny research subject in a years-long clinical trial.

I placed fossil shark teeth my family and I had collected over the years into Cricket’s shark outline. Those little teeth were slippery, and I kept knocking them out of position. My frustration could be heard throughout the land. Once I had finally placed all the teeth, I photographed the image.

Different colors are associated with different book genres and themes. For instance, books about the environment often incorporate greens and blues, while books about health often use reds. Again, I didn’t want to select a background color that might suggest narrow subject content. So I chose a bright yellow-orange to signify urgency and the need for attention, like a traffic sign or a double-yellow line.

Even selecting the right shade of yellow-orange was a process that required numerous drafts and printings. Earlier digitally generated versions of the background felt too dark or too bold, which seemed to distract from the shark. Eventually I brought out the watercolors and physically painted a background on textured paper, then scanned the painting. This technique softened the background, which I hope will help to draw the reader’s eye to the shark.

Time will tell if these calculations will result in attracting the intended audience of bright, curious readers!