Every story I’ve ever worked on usually starts with an image. I get a picture in my mind that slowly becomes clearer as more and more details fill in. The more I sit with the image, the more I gather about the where, the when, the who. I start to feel textures, smell aromas, hear the sounds of life. This centralized image forms a skeleton.

I write to explore and to flesh out what that image – a symbol really – means. Dreams and the subconscious speak to us in symbols, so I’m aware I’m working with something primal and universal and I try to let those forces guide me. When I first started writing Believe, the image that kept coming up was a shotgun hidden in a closet. It was kind of tossed in there like laundry, but you couldn’t forget it. It had a presence all its own.

The shotgun is a powerful symbol in Believe, so potent and game changing it could be called a character in itself. And when I was ready to publish, I started scouring the stock photo sites for pictures of shotguns, shells, gunshots, the works – a grim dive into breech weapons. I finally settled on an image that jumped out to me from all the others. This was IT! I had attained jacket cover Nirvana. So what happened?

The cover was, in actuality, pretty terrible – a curse not uncommon among Indie titles. In my defense, it was my first and I was still very much at the beginning stages of self-publishing a book through Amazon. You tend to get a little crazy as an indie author, especially when you’re first starting out – you are an island, the sole creator, you can do it all alone, genius and martyr that you are! The book did pretty well considering, but every now and then someone I trust would pull me aside and say: dude, about that cover…

I tried to modify the cover a bit, but always with this central image that I was too emotionally attached to to let go. What finally got through to me was talking to a professional book designer who had read the book. She said that the shotgun wasn’t the story, the real story was Jared November’s journey – the crossroads he struggles with between life and death, denial and belief. She convinced me that things like typography and layout really do require a trained eye and that working with other professionals isn’t a sign of surrender, but of growth as an artist.

The results, I feel, really do speak for themselves. I’m sure there’s also some lessons in here about surrendering control, getting too attached to our own vision, and that no man is an island. But what do I know, I just write books now and then…