I just put my dustcover copy on the website and you can check it out in the synopsis section. I’m so excited. The cover is real. There’s really going to be a book. There’s my name and it’s a novel. It’s like having the ultrasound when I was pregnant. I knew I was pregnant because I was vomiting every morning and, oh yeah, there was this pregnancy test, but until I saw the ultrasound it was just a claim.  

After signing a contract with Sunstone Press, we sat down and started going over the process and I’m going to save all that for a later story because right now I want to talk about MY COVER! As I was going through the very cumbersome editing process the cover was always hanging over my head. Initially I didn’t think it would be difficult because I have some artistic talent. You know, I’m good with color, I like to doodle, I used to do macramé and paint rocks when I was in high school so I figured the cover would just come to me.  

But it didn’t and at some point my publisher said it was time to come up with the cover…any ideas? I know they were prepared to do that for me but it was something I really wanted to do myself. I thought about a montage of objects or subjects from the novel, things that would be attractive on the cover but would have to make sense after the reader got into the book. Or maybe just some interesting artwork, something simple using muted colors, the colors of west Texas storm clouds, or Regan’s barn (you’ll have to read the book for that color).

One warm afternoon in Dripping Springs I sat down at the computer with my website designer, Christi, after we had finished riding six horses. We went onto photos.com, a royalty-free photography website. Let me tell you, if you don’t have access to one of these sites you need to get it because it is one of the more enjoyable parts of developing a website or writing any article and now I go to it to make cards and sometimes just to get ideas. A lot of the pictures you see on my website, basically any pictures that are not of me or my horses, come from that website.

Christi suggested that we use it to try to come up with a cover idea because she knew I was losing sleep over it. We started out searching for pictures of elements from the book: medicine, horses, ranching, football stadiums, team roping. There are photographs of all of these things. Add description: grey horses, west Texas ranches, football stadiums at night. Look for art and tangential elements: spurs, saddle tooling, a horse’s soft eye.  There were wonderful pictures of all these things and any probably would have been acceptable.  

My book starts out with my protagonist driving, on a highway, in a rainstorm, and it's an important scene so we put in the word "car."  There were fifty million pages of cars so we added "on a highway" and that narrowed it down to one hundred and forty two pages, so we added "in a rainstorm."  Christi had read my book and when the first page of thumbnails depicting cars on highways in a rainstorm popped up on the screen we looked at each other like "yea-yuh"  because we could instantly see there were several that spoke to us. There were a couple of particularly appealing pictures taken from the driver's perspective. And one of them was looking out the windshield, the view slightly obscured, down a disappearing highway.  

We put the word "highway"  in and my cover was there. Several pictures of disappearing highways along with a few pictures of mileage markers and interstate signs were just the ticket. I could have even visualized the green Texas mileage markers on the cover.  

I picked the disappearing highway and it has been my idea for the cover since that day. Many of you have already seen the initial pick on my synopsis page, the disappearing highway lined by scrub conifers. It could be anywhere in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona.  

I sent it to my publisher who loved the idea but wanted an original photo. They were going to just hire someone to go out on some desolate highway in New Mexico to take the shot when I found Rick Ligas, a photographer who had taken some disappearing highway shots already. He and his wife were just getting ready to move to Italy when I found him and we secured the photograph you now see on my website. Sunstone Press came up with the great idea of making the photo encompass the entire cover, front and back. And my pretty lettering of course. Endings...a Novel...Barbara Bergin.  

Let me know if you like it but don't tell me if you don't because it's a done deal, okay?  If you are so inclined and don't have anything else to do, you can do what I did.  Print up the picture of my cover, cut it out with 3 1/2 extra inches of paper on the left and 1 extra inch on the right. Then fold it like a dustcover and voilą, you'll have a miniature model of my book that you can sit on your desk as a reminder of what is to come...only bigger of course.


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