IDEAL LIFE: Cover reveal for my next book!
Author Diary: I'm the WORST at helping on cover design
Hello, Protagonists!
Welcome to another entry in Author Diaries—where Joanna and I take you behind the scenes of publishing—querying, book auctions, cover design, how authors make money, book publicity, and more.
In this post you’ll find:
📚 What’s Filling My Creative Well—books or articles that are lighting up my brain
🎉 PEOPLE Magazine - Cover Reveal for my next book, Ideal Life
📖 Exclusive Excerpt from Ideal Life
As always, thank you for being here, not just as readers, but as fellow story-lovers and co-dreamers of this beautiful, bookish life.
xo,
Joanna & Evelyn
📚 What’s Filling My Creative Well
Currently reading:
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert — this is the last reading assignment in the “Love and the French Novel” online class I’m taking. I can’t believe I’ve never read it before (I don’t even know what it’s about!) so I’m excited to finally have a reason to crack this one open.
🎉 Cover Reveal: Ideal Life
No matter how many books you publish (this is #11 for me), you never get tired of the moment when you get to share the cover art of a new book.
My next novel won’t be on shelves till August 2026, but today, PEOPLE Magazine did the cover reveal!!
(there’s bigger image down below, don’t worry about zooming in here 😉)
Behind the Scenes: Color options + My Visual Ineptitude
Simon & Schuster’s Art Department had given me two choices—a calm blue palette or this bright pink. My editor, agent, publicist, and I all fell in love with how the pink popped off the page.
If you had asked me to design the cover, I never would have thought of this bright color palette.
True story:
A few months back, my editor asked if I had any ideas for the visual direction of this cover.
I said:
The one idea I had for Ideal Life was something with the purple star that is the logo of the main character’s startup. If we’re looking for a singular focal point for the cover, it could be sort of like the power-up star from Super Mario Brothers, but purple and no eyes.
Then I sent her these two pieces of clip art:
I am not the most helpful when it comes to visual stuff. 😂
When my editor got the email, I’m sure she thought, What the heck am I supposed to do with this? Or she laughed. (Probably both).
Anyway, this is why it’s so wonderful to work with experts who understand not only how to capture the spirit of the story you’ve written, but also how to capture the attention of potential readers. Thank goodness for my editor and art department (and input from the sales team)!
(It’s not just about bookstore shelves anymore; it’s also about thumbnail images. I wrote in depth about the considerations behind cover art in an Author Diary last year.)
📖 Exclusive Excerpt from Ideal Life
Today I get to unveil the official book description:
In New York Times bestselling author Evelyn Skye’s warmhearted and lightly magical novel, an opportunity to turn back time gives a scientist the chance to pursue her ideal life, only to realize it might keep her from truly living. Perfect for fans of Rebecca Serle and Taylor Jenkins Reid.
What if you could rewind the last 24 hours and perfect your life?
Talia Morgan has built her dream: a neuroscience startup poised for a $100 million acquisition that will validate years of relentless work to make the world better through technology. But when a glitch in her app leads to a catastrophe, everything she’s worked for crumbles in a single night.
Then Talia wakes up with a mysterious watch that lets her rewind the last twenty-four hours. Suddenly, she can prevent the glitch, ace that crucial meeting, and savor perfect Sunday afternoons with Sam, her brilliant best friend who’s quietly loved her for nearly two decades. The watch feels like the ultimate optimization tool, a way to debug her life until every moment is flawless.
But Talia’s addiction to rewriting her past comes at a devastating cost. Each rewind pulls her further from the people she loves most: Sam, who watches helplessly as she disappears into endless cycles of perfection; Libby, her globe-trotting sister who needs support that Talia is too distracted to give; and most dangerously, from her own true, authentic self.
When Talia discovers a conspiracy to turn her life’s work into a tool for mass manipulation, she faces an impossible choice: use the watch to cheat her way to stopping it, or accept that the messy, imperfect version of her life might be the only one worth living.
From New York Times bestselling author Evelyn Skye comes an incisive exploration of ambition, perfectionism, and the modern pressure to optimize our way to happiness—a story that asks whether our relentless pursuit of an ideal life might be keeping us from truly living at all.
🤓 Want to read an excerpt? PEOPLE Magazine has the exclusive excerpt HERE!
» (and, *ahem*, Ideal Life is now available for preorder)
🥰 Thank you for supporting your friendly neighborhood author!
» This post is part of our Author Diary series. You can find past entries HERE.
It looks amazing! There’s so much meaning and depth to it for such a clean cover!
I love the cover and the concept of your new novel, Evelyn! Congrats! 🎉💕 It sounds like it will be a great read.
I found your story of the cover art relatable, and it brought up a memory for me of when I worked in scientific journal publishing. I helped with the production of several neuroscience titles. For one journal, the editor would always ask me to pick two different images from the issue we were compiling so that he could choose one to be used on the cover. This was a challenge for me every time as I was an English major, not a neuroscientist, and the images were often neuron / brain / fMRI imagery.