Re-covering!

look how shiny!!!

I have felt incredibly lucky with my book covers over the years. I truly think they’re gorgeous. And for a run of three - Since You’ve Been Gone, The Unexpected Everything, and Save theDate - we did full photoshoot productions.

Getting to help cast the dogs for the TUE cover honestly might be the highlight of my life as an author. And since these covers were photoshoots, they feel incredibly tied to my books. The SYBG cover in particular feels like art to me. We had hired the models, but I wasn’t loving the clothes options for the girls. And at that point I felt like I KNEW Sloane and Emily, knew what they’d wear. So I sent a box of my things that I thought would work.

On the cover, the model portraying Emily is wearing my Wildfox tank top - it reads It Was The Best of Times, which is very perfect for this book. Sloane is wearing my Mayle top. The hair tie on her wrist is mine. And she’s, most crucially, wearing my heart sunglasses I tossed in at the last minute. I have this picture framed in my house - because it’s always felt like art to me.

But!! These covers are very much OF A TIME. Back when they were coming out, the photographic YA cover was A THING. But times change and tastes shift and that’s no longer where the market is. My later books - Take Me Home Tonight and The Ballad of Darcy and Russell - both got illustrated covers. Covers that I LOVED. But this meant that my backlist was feeling a little disjointed - some covers with photos, some with illustrations, no cohesion.

Well, NO MORE!

S&S is incredibly awesome, and they’re re-designing my whole backlist. The same artist, the brilliant Ali Mac, is doing the art. And Since You’ve Been Gone and Second Chance Summer are available starting today! Target, Walmart, B&N, all the indies. I was at Diesel over the weekend and got to see them a few days early, on the shelf!

cue the Kelly Clarkson

The rest of the books will roll out, two at a time, in the months to come. But they’re all SO cute. I can’t tell you how great the foil looks in person. And did you see the SPRAYED EDGES?! CAN YOU EVEN?!

eeeeeeee!!!!

I’ve also had the opportunity to revisit the text, and gently move things into the present when possible. (There was actually just an article about this!) Don’t worry, I’m not making any big changes.

But SCS is fourteen years old, somehow, which is weird, because I haven’t aged a day.

So it was mostly not having QUITE so many mentions of iPods. Changing text thread to group chat. And in my book from 2016 I kept calling it a cell phone?? It’s just a phone now, thank you very much. Nothing that would even get noticed by anyone - but it was fun to revisit all these books, and take a little ramble down memory lane.

The one that we’re not doing this with is Amy & Roger. So much of this book is about not being contactable, about paper maps, and no smart phones, and iPod playlists. About the moment when you could still step off the grid for a moment and be unfindable - and maybe find yourself along the way. So we decided to make A&R a historical novel (sob). It’s now textually set in 2010, which will explain things like why nobody has the internet on their phones, but also why Roger doesn’t get to listen to Hamilton (which he absolutely would have LOVED).

To kick off the launch of these re-releases, Simon Teen is giving extended free sneak peeks!! Check em out here!

So cool right? And there’s a ton of fun bonus content in the new SYBG!

It’s been so great to revisit these books - to see what they were, and imagine what new editions of them could look like. I’m excited for new readers to find them - and for readers who’ve been here from the beginning to get to hang out with some old friends.

xoxo

mm