So Here's The Thing: Invincible Summer's Cover

When I first saw this book, I thought it was a summer kind of read. I've heard it's rather emotional. The cover doesn't make it appear that way at all!

Because of the cover I did think it was going to be a beachy read that I wouldn't be able to get into.

The cover of this book is entirely misleading.

Actually, I'm ashamed to say I think I DID judge this by it's cover. I've seen it around a bunch of times, wasn't really drawn in by the cover so just skipped over it. STUPID ME! This sounds like exactly my kind of read!

Cover and synopsis are pretty misleading. Don't judge this book based on the cover.

First off, this cover is weirdly my #1 favorite of 2011 so far!

The cover is so infuriatingly off. But honestly, I don't have a better idea....maybe a portrait of Albert Camus?

The current cover sucks. They should really let readers take votes on these things before they come out.

The synopsis is a little misleading. Sure there were girls and boys, love and lust, and a beach, but that wasn't what the book was about.

The cover and the reviews I've read of this book turned out to be 2 different things.

They really should change the cover. It doesn't fit the book whatsoever.

From all the reviews I've read, I just can't get over the fact that the cover kind of gives the wrong impression

Now I'm going to tell you that this whole blurb is totally inadequate and only the very last line really describes this book, in my opinion. Also, this is the worst cover ever for this book.

These are all quotes from reviews, positive and negative, and I could go on forever and ever. These are the ones I could find in five minutes.

All right, guys. I hear ya.

I did a post a while back where I responded to a lot of the "wow, your cover makes me want to go to the gym" comments I'd gotten, etc. (A quick summary of that post: you're hot, shut up, and that chick is photoshopped. I saw her when she had half the tits she has now.)

But this is kind of a different issue, yeah? Because this isn't really about what the cover looks like, but about what it says about the book.

It's a beautiful cover. I'll state that outright. It's a cover I'm proud to have on one of my books. It's doing its job and people are picking it up. I think the spine in particular is absolutely lovely. If you've seen IS in person, you'll know that the cover is made out of some kind of fantastic soft I don't even know that makes you want to put your head on it and go to sleep.

It's a beautiful cover.

But no, it's not the cover I would have chosen for this book.

So my 2012 book, Gone, Gone, Gone? It's a love story. It is so completely a love story. The WIP is a love story. I fucking love writing love stories.

Back in 2008, when I wrote IS, I did not know how to write a love story.

And I wasn't trying to.

This is a story about a family.

Some of the people up there ^ are responding to a little line at the end of the goodreads description that says "Not your typical beach read." That's not part of the real blurb. That's not on the back of the book.

That's something I went in and added myself a few weeks ago.

My publisher is amazing. Hands down. And they chose a cover and a blurb that would get people to pick it up. And I think it's working. I honestly could not be happier with how many people seem to be hearing about IS and picking it up. I saw a comment on an interview the other day where a girl said that the only reason IS was popular was because it had a chick in a bikini on it. Um guys. SHE SAID MY BOOK IS POPULAR.

This cover is doing its job. My publisher knows its shit, man. It's a beautiful cover, and I have so much support from the beautiful people in-house, and damn am I proud of my little book and INCREDIBLY thankful for the people who helped me make it and nourish it and get it out into the world. I really can't say that enough, and if you take one thing away from this post, let that be it.

But see, this cover is also pissing you guys off.

And that part sucks.

You all know this, but it's worth repeating: authors don't choose their covers. Authors don't write the blurb on the back of the book. And here's one you maybe don't hear as often: authors do not know what sells.

Yes, the love triangle aspect of IS's plot has been heavily pushed. It has been since the second my then-agent read it. The two brothers sleeping with the same girl? Of course it's weird. It's the hook because it's weird. It's not a hook I'd thought of. It wasn't a major part of the story, as far as I was concerned.

Once the book sold, I amped that up and made it a larger part of the plot. I made Noah have a real relationship with Melinda. I added more fights and conversations. These things absolutely strengthened the book as a whole.

It's not as if my book was ruined by this marketing, is what I'm trying to say.

The only part of that book I can control is what happens inside of it. And the truth is, the parts of that that I think are important would make really shitty book covers. Like the girl up there said, how do you design a book cover for a book about brothers and sign language and sex and Camus?

It's not easy.

But please. That don't judge a book by its cover thing? You have to understand something.

When you don't pick up a book because of its cover, you are not punishing the design team.

When you say, I would have picked up this book, but I hate the cover, so I won't, you are not punishing the design team.

When you refuse to read a review or take a second look at a book because of its cover, you are not punishing the design team.

You are punishing the author.

There are SO MANY reasons not to pick up my book. If that's the road you want to take, pick a good reason! Make it something that I did wrong. Make it about the ugly paragraph on page whatever or the fact that you hate books about big families or that you hate philosophy or that I peed on your front lawn or I said something mean to you on twitter or you don't like my nose. Make it something about ME. About something I did. Okay, maybe not the nose thing, then.

But guys. It's a book about a family. I will tell you a zillion times if I have to. It is a book about a boy and his family. It is a book about a boy and the siblings he is co-dependently creepy close to. There is sex in. There is more sign language than there is sex. This is not a book about a girl.

Not to mention, and here's the zinger:

I have made an executive decision.

If we're going by screen(page?)-time and character importance alone, that's Chase's goddamn sister (the only character in the book ever described as wearing, and I quote, "that green bikini," just sayin') on the cover and NOT the girl Chase and Noah are sleeping with.

And Claudia, the little sister, is the hero of the story. I will say that a million times too. Claudia is the hero of the story.

And in my mind, that's Claudia on the cover. That's my girl.

She deserves a cover.

And believing that makes me like my cover a hell of a lot more. Because it makes it darker and stranger and a fuckload more awkward and dirty sexy and God don't you want to put a towel on her and cover her up now? GOOD. Then read my book because you will like it. Seriously. Read this book if you want to cover up your little sister.

My point is: it's Claudia on the cover. That's my official statement. It's Claudia on the cover. And any time discussion of this cover ever comes up again, that's what I'm going to say.

And if you want to do me a favor, you will a. buy the book because bitch has to eat and b. TELL PEOPLE. You don't have to defend the cover. You don't have to like it. You don't have to offer a big explanation. But if you see a review dissing it, just leave a comment that says, "Hey, actually that's the sister on the cover."

And then walk away.

And that won't change the way a lot of people feel. But maybe, maybe it'll make a few say guhwhatthefuck? And that's why I write, really. It's especially why I write messed up shit like IS.

So. The chick on the cover. It's Claudia. And it is a beautiful cover beacause Claudia is goddamn beautiful.

It's not Melinda. It's not the girl they're sleeping with.

And really, this is all kind of appropriate, because it's Melinda's job to screw up everything.

So that's really all I have to say, so I'm going to leave you with a few things.

The first is Invincible Summer's trailer. Yeah, I just posted this. Have it again. And here's why.

1. I worked closely with Vania in developing this. I chose the images at the beginning. I also told her I wanted making out. Because making out sells, guys. That's the moral of this story. And maybe that sucks a little.

The more important reason is:

2. The voiceover? I wrote that. Just me. No input. Vania said do whatever you want, make it in Chase's voice. And I wrote that. It isn't an excerpt from the story.

And maybe it's a response to that girl, that girl that everyone assumes--and I'm not saying it's dumb to assume this, guys, it's only natural--is the girl on my cover, and therefore the girl everyone thinks is the focus of the story.

Maybe that's what the voice over is about. Maybe I'm talking about the girl who ruined it.

I don't know.



And I'll also give you links to two reviews, one positive and one negative, from two people who I think really captured what the book is about, whether or not they liked it.


Nay

Yay


I would absolutely love comments on this post, and I would also love if you would tweet the shit out of this or get it tattooed on you or otherwise let this be known to the entirety of the world. Make a song out of this post and then sing it. Put it on youtube. Add a bugle. Self-publish a book with only the words IT'S CLAUDIA ON THE COVER repeated over and over and over.

Whatever you do, be it tattoo or nothing, thank you for reading. This is all for you guys, you know?

INVINCIBLE SUMMER Playlist: Song 8

SONG #8: "Slang" by Def Leppard.

So...to put it super plainly, this is the sexiest song I know.

It's filthy and dirty and really hot, both in the sexy sense and the sense that you are doing it stuck to leather seats in the back of someone's car, probably still wearing half of your bikini, no makeup, sweaty. Pretty is something you gave up several days and several sunburns earlier.

So we're at that part of the book.

If you've read any of the summaries of Invincible Summer, you'll know that Chase and his brother are sleeping with the same girl.

It's not what the book is about.

But it's there, and it goes something like this.

SAMPLE LYRIC:

Slang with me, I don't wanna get my hands dirty
Slang with me, I just wanna get soakin' wet
Slang with me, I don't wanna get my hands dirty
All I ever wanna get is slang

It's my intention to be your obsession
(Mi pasion, mi obsesion, queria que eastuvieras conmigo)
It's my obsession to be your addiction

CORRELATING PASSAGE:

God, maybe she knew I would tell him. Maybe she wanted us to fight over her like hungry animals. I want to tell her that I can tell when I'm being used, but this seems like a lofty statement when I don't think I've ever been used before.

--p. 145



PLAYLIST SO FAR:

1) "Turn Up The Sun" by Oasis
2) "Island in the Sun" by Weezer
3) "Just Like Heaven" by Gatsby's American Dream
4) "Bigger Than My Body" by John Mayer
5) "New Soul" by Yael Naim
6) "Across the Universe" by Rufus Wainwright
7) "Boys of Summer" by The Ataris
8) "Slang" by Def Leppard

The Boy Problem

First, you need to know my position.

--I am a writer, not a publisher or a bookseller.
--I am primarily a YA writer, but I write MG as well.
--I am female, sex and gender alike.
--So far, all of my finished novels, and certainly all of my published ones, have had male protagonists.
--95% of what I read is contemporary. I don't generally like SF/F.
--I generally prefer to read books with male protagonists
--About 70% of my reading is in YA.


Now.

People have been talking about the issue of boys in YA for a long time, but these discussions seem to have reached a head recently--one that I think has been a long time coming.

I want to make it clear that there are going to be exceptions to every single thing I say. One of the big points I'm trying to make in this post, in fact, is that generalizing doesn't fucking work. So please understand that none of what I will say is true 100% of the time, and your knowledge that there are exceptions to what I'm about to lay out might not invalidate what I'm saying. This is literature. Nothing is universal.

So.

The problem we're talking about is fairly simple: boys don't read YA. This isn't an issue of "boys don't read"--we're not talking about these boys. We're talking about avid readers, boys who ate up middle grade but go to adult fiction and non-fiction instead of passing through YA, and nobody really knows why.

I'm not an expert on this. I'm just a chick who writes, at least from my point of view, the kind of YA that is the closest that we have right now to "boy books," which is really just to say that my books have male main characters, because right now that is all we offer boys.

And it isn't enough.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've come up with a lot of theories for why boys aren't reading YA. Some of these probably aren't true. Maybe most of them aren't. But whether or not these are the root of the problems, they are issues that I'm seeing swept under the rug, and I believe they're truths we don't want to look at.

It's not all the writer's fault. We've all heard that publishers don't buy boy books--and 1. they do, and 2. why should they if they aren't selling--and it pisses me the fuck off how many boys there are who won't pick up a book with a girl main character or, heaven forbid, a book with a chick's name in the cover.

It's not entirely our fault. But it does start with us.

Here's what we did:

--We've stereotyped boys. Most boys in YA fit into four very particular categories.

1) The gay best friend. The gay best friend is sassy. He's also deeply damaged and vulnerable from the trauma of being gay. The girl--our main character, always--might be his only friend. He desperately needs her. Maybe he has a drug problem due to his inner torment.

2) The best guy friend. Practically like the gay best friend except he's straight, and he doesn't have inner torment. In fact, he's sweet, attentive, and as reliable as death/taxes. He's also in love with the girl MC, who for some reason hasn't noticed him even though he was always there. Don't worry, by the end of the book, she'll realize he's The One.

3) The bad boy. This is the one we're all familiar with. He's pure motorcycle on the outside, but deep down, he's just a marshmallow of love for our main character. He doesn't open up to anyone else, but he loves this one girl. He needs her. Yeah, you're all thinking about that series I haven't read, I know it, you know it, we don't need to name it.

4) The nerdy boy. This is (usually, remember usually, we're talking about usually) the only boy you will ever find as a main character. If you find a male POV, it's usually him. He's geeky but never pimply, nerdy but always in a socially-proficient, sarcastic, endearing way. He talks about masturbation because it's funny, not because of something he really likes. He's a bookworm girl's wet dream.

Which leads me to the second thing writers have done:

--We've sanitized boys. What MG books do boys love? Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, books that appeal to their light side. In our efforts to empower girls (oh, and trust me, there will be much more on this later) we've forgotten that it's irrelevant right now that it's hard to grow up as a girl in today's world full of fashion magazines and celebrity marriages and mirrors in every dressing room; it's hard to grow up a boy in a world where Dad wants you to play baseball and you want to draw pictures or you want to play baseball but your best friend didn't make the team.

I'm simplifying, obviously, and you can flip and flop the sexes here--boys don't always love the mirrors either, and maybe Dad would rather braid your hair then cheer you on in the stands--but we're not arguing about which sex has it harder, we're just acknowledging a fact that YA isn't right now--boys aren't skipping their way through high school, either.

So why do MG books remember this and not YA? Why are MG books looking at showing boys every aspect of themselves, like Greg's issues with his drippy friends and his little brother, and simultaneously giving them an escape with superheros and gross-out humor, when this seems to be something that YA can't grasp?

Well, I'll tell you why.

--We've stripped boys of substance and we did it to empower girls. Somehow, the message "girls can do it too" became "only a girl can do it," and men became the weaker sex in YA.

Where are the epic fantasy trilogies with male main characters? Harry Potter isn't YA, people, stop pretending. When, since Eragon, have boys gotten to save the world? Where is the Melissa Marr for boys? Where is--yeah--Twilight for boys? Where is the science fiction that boys loved in YA, and we just assumed, for some reason, they were fine with losing when they turned 14?

Oh yeah--they're over there in adult fiction, and that's where the teenage boys are going to be, too.

Boys in YA are rubber walls for our 3D female characters to bounce off of. They're props for girls to throw around to show that they're the stronger sex.

And I get that we need to empower girls, people. I get it. But how many books about girls do we need before we can consider that a job well done?

So here's how to fix it. And this is a call to writers, and it's a call to publishers, and it's a call to readers.

--Write, publish, and promote books with real boys. Stop talking and just fucking do it. Read Shaun Hutchinson's The Deathday Letter. Now read it again.

There will be no question in your mind about whether or not Oliver is written as fantasy fodder for a girl. Oliver is not written for a girl. Period. Oliver is written for Oliver, and he is real.

Now realize that he is just one boy, and that you can write any boy you want. Nothing pisses me off like a writer saying that boys have to strong, quiet about how they're feeling, but secretly weak underneath their hardened exterior.

NO! Your boy does not have to be ANYTHING. STOP MAKING BOYS THAT HAVE TO BE SOMETHING. We are no longer allowed to even hint that a girl has to have a specific quality for fear of someone calling sexism, so I am calling sexism on you.

Stop writing this boy you've imagined in your head and write a real boy. Make him gross or sweet or angry or well-adjusted or affectionate or uncomfortable or confused or ambitious or overwhelmed or smitten or anxious or depressed or desperate or happy. Write a boy the same way everyone has been telling everyone, forever, to write a girl; free of gender stereotypes, three-dimensional, and relatable.

Write books that lead logically from middle grade, that don't assume that boys wash their brains out when they hit puberty.

Put covers on books, no matter the gender of the main character, that boys will not be embarrassed to read on the subway. (My vlog tomorrow will have more on this). Teach boys that they don't need a man's name on the cover to know that they will like it.

Agents and publishers, either stop saying you're looking for boy books or start meaning it. Or figure out what a boy book is, because we need someone to explain it to us.

And I'm okay if it means, right now, "books with a male POV." Because I understand that that's a stepping stone boys need right now. I'm not okay with boys indefinitely refusing to read books with a girl's point of view. I'm completely okay with them only reading books that have real male characters in them. Let's make it easy for them to find them, first.

Write and publish fantasy and science fiction (FOR GOD'S SAKE WHERE IS THE SCIENCE FICTION) with strong male main characters. Boys need their blockbusters, too, and it doesn't matter how you feel about YA fantasy--you know just as well as I do what's selling, so let's expand that past the girl's point of view.

Boys. Shut up and read YA. The books are there. There aren't enough, we're absolutely sorry. But they're there. Stop insisting they're not. And I'm trying. And we're trying.

And we can't do this without you.

And the boy reader in your life isn't going to find this post on his own because he doesn't know me because he doesn't read YA, so you know what to do. This post has a link for a reason.

Tail End of Tuesday

I have a real post coming at you tomorrow, but today is Tuesday, so have a teaser and a video. This video won't make much sense to you unless you saw Monday's (which is right here!) but you might enjoy it anyway. If you're into that.

From FISHBOY. Rudy is doing his homework. Teeth interrupts.

--


I'm only lying there for a few minutes before he bobs out of the water. “Hey.”

I try not to look surprised. It's been a few days since the rescue with not a lot of signs of him, and I guess I didn't think he'd be the one seeking me out. Maybe I didn't really think I was going to see him again unless he needed more saving.

I'm getting used to the look of him, at least, with his flaky scales and his millions of bruises. “Hey,” I say.

“Aren't you cold?”

I shrug. What else am I supposed to say, yeah, but I was hoping you'd swim up?

“What are you working on?

“Math.”

“I can do addition.”

I look at him.

“I'm very smart,” he says.

Still, I don't know where a guy like him learns addition, or where he even learns the word addition. And he speaks English really naturally, not in a way I'd expect from someone who's only ever eavesdropped and never spoken himself.

He leans his elbows onto the dock and watches me work. Then he sinks under the water, and I think he's gone for good for today, but a few seconds later he pops up behind me on the other side of the dock.

“What are you doing?” I ask him. He's back beside me again, this time with his elbow right next to mine. But now I can only see him out of the corner of my eye. He smells like a fish, I'll give him that.

“Watching.”

He touches the numbers as I write them, then he turns his attention to the lines at the top of the page. He traces the date, then puts his finger on the word next to it. He writes the letters with one finger, trying and failing to curl up the rest of his hand. The webs between his fingers stretch so thin.

I stop working and watch his finger. He's left-handed.

After a minute, he says, “Rrrr.”

“Hmm?”

He's staring at the top of the page. “Rrr. Ruh.”

Oh.

“Ruhd,” he says, after another minute. He's frowning hard, the skin wrinkling between his eyes.

“Rudy,” I say, kind of gently, I hope.

He's quiet for a minute. Then, “Oh.”

“Where the fuck did you learn how to read?”

“I can't read. You just saw me not reading.”

“Someone obviously taught you something.”

“Go away,” he says, in this small angry voice, the exact same one Dylan uses when he wants me to think I'm mad at him but he really isn't. It doesn't work any better when Teeth uses it.

I say, “You know, if you want? I can teach you to read.”

He studies me for just a second before he frowns hard and dives back into the water. He's really gone this time. He splashed my page, and now I can't read the math problems. The ink is all smudged.