“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”


In the aftermath of self-publishing my first novel, I came across one of these strange life moments when you wonder if this is all really real or perhaps just a dream, or some bizarre VR computer game.

My novel falls into the broad category of general/literary fiction. It’s a genre that’s unlikely to sell many copies, particularly as it’s not being pushed by a major publishing house.

Self-publishing carries a number of unwelcome burdens for writers: promotion, publicity and distribution among them. But, before all of those bite, there is the decision that, so people say, can make or break a book: the cover.

How much to spend on the cover when you’re not going to make much, if anything from the book? It’s a difficult balance. I actually knew with a strong conviction how I wanted my cover to look, so decided to attempt it myself. The image in my mind was inspired by one of my favourite scenes from the book, in which one of the two main protagonists, who happens to be a dog (!), is meditating and allows his mind to reach out into the universe, where he feels himself surfing among the stars and galaxies.

Choosing the first image was straightforward. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope site provides even the poorest fantasist with day-dream material to last years.

More tricky was finding a surfing dog. Remember I didn’t want to spend a whole load of money. I’d loved the cover of my first book but paying the photographer seriously dented the possibility of any profit.

I trawled the internet for copyright-free images, selecting about a dozen to work with. Most were photos of a dog with a man and a surfboard. In principle those fitted my mental image because, in the book, the dog forms a very close bond with a man. However, I couldn’t work out how to integrate those images successfully with the images of space.

I eventually settled on an image of a dog breaking through the surf and formed a composite image with one from the HST. It might not be a purists’ book cover, and perhaps being off-norm it won’t sell many books, but the cover fits the story and my mind’s image, so I’m happy.

After the book had been published, I contacted the image copyright owners to let them know that I had used their original images.

I received a heart-warming reply from the photographer, Ulrike:

“You took the right dog! Our dog is very sensitive, she is deaf and very much able to read her beloved ones. We found her on the streets in Cape Town almost dead as a 10 week old puppy. Starved, no hair, full of tics and flees. She was probably abandoned because of her deafness. White fur dogs with different coloured eyes carry the Merle gen. People try to play God and design dogs and sometimes things go wrong and the unperfect results are left to die. So we have been at the right time at the right spot.”

Well, that’s a pretty accurate description of Willow, the protagonist dog in the story who is abandoned as a pup and left to die in a wheelie-bin. He is male and is not deaf but is extremely sensitive and develops special powers of being able to read moods by seeing auras in different colours.

Choose a copyright-free image of a dog for your cover that exactly fits the spirit of the book and the nature of the protagonist. Easy, isn’t it?

So: coincidence, predestination or just plain old random?

You decide.