Can you tell a book by its cover?

I'm delighted to reveal the new cover of Jessie, my fictional biography of Jessie Benton Fremont. Jessie was a fascinating figure who played a huge role in American history--but always behind the scenes, while her father, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and her husband, John Charles Fremont, captured the headlines. Missouri Senator Benton was a major power in the manifest destiny movement; Fremont was an adventurer and explorer who led the Bear Flag revolt in California; he was first a successful miner and then a failed one; an officer in the Union Army, he had the audacity to announce emancipation before President Lincoln did--a major gaffe in his career. The first Republican candidate for the presidency, he lost the election; the governor of the Arizona Territory, he was once again a failure. But Jessie remained loyal, having gone from a heady household of power and a beautiful ocean-front home on the Pacific to hard times during the Civil War, abject humiliation in trying to absolve her husband, and, finally, poverty. Jessie left us a legacy in writing late in her life. Hers is a story of passionate love, loyalty--and failure. She was one strong woman.
This is the fourth of the longish fictional biographies I wrote in the '90s, and it's being reprinted by ePub Works which has created the series, Real Women of the American West, for my biographies. They sent me proposed art work for the cover--some southern belles with ruffles and laces and fluttering eyelashes that I deemed totally inappropriate. Jessie was involved in serious national matters, and I assume her demeanor reflected that. We finally settled on the portrait above, with a background that I hope looks like the mining mountains of California. Watch for the digital book in mid-to-late August.
I learned a strong lesson of the importance of covers when the first of these biographies was published. It was Libbie, the story of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, culminating in her husband's death at Little Big Horn. I wasn't sure about the cover sent me by Bantam, the original publisher, but I was young and green and thrilled to have a book coming from a big New York publisher. I didn't protest. In retrospect, there are several things wrong with that cover: Libbie stands in knee-high grass (the lush prairies of Kansas) next to a barbed wire fence--barbed wire was first introduced in Texas about two years before Custer died, so there's no way Kansas was fenced. In the background is a wooden stockade on bare brown earth--Arizona, not Kansas. And there were no stockades in the West--not enough lumber. In fact, Libbie wrote about her alarm that most western forts were simply a collection of buildings with no perimeter, no fences, nothing between her and the "savages." One friend said, "She looks like Madonna in 19th century dress" and indeed photographs show a much more demure Libbie than this one. Ah, what we do for sales. Here is the current cover of Libbie, much more suited to the real Libbie.
I've learned to be critical about covers, and I'm pleased about this one for Jessie. I hope  you like it too and want to read the book.

I’m my own guest

I usually welcome a guest author on Wednesday, with the suggestion that he or she tell us a bit about their life and work. This week, I have no guest, so I’m going to be my own guest and tell you how I ended up writing almost 60 books, a Chicago-born Midwesterner living in Texas.

I think I always knew I wanted to write—wrote my first short stories at about eight, submitted a story to Seventeen in high school (gosh, did it come back in a hurry) and in college began writing nonfiction articles for small magazines. The zenith of my magazine career was a small piece on adoption in McCall’s. By then I was the parent of two or three adopted children. I am now the proud parent of four, grandparent of seven.

I got my interest in the American West while working on my Ph.D. at Texas Christian University. One of my professors taught a class in Western American lit.—I liked him and liked the class. And I’m glad to say nearly fifty years later, he’s still a good friend.

After I got that degree, I stayed home, wanted to write and had no idea what to write about. By serendipity I read several novels that featured young girls as protagonists, and I knew what I could do—turn my friend’s mother’s memoir into a novel. It was a great leap for me, since I’d had no training in creative writing—they didn’t teach it back then.

But I did it. I wrote After Pa Was Shot, which was published by the then-prestigious New York house, William Morrow. A succession of young adult novels followed—I was cast into that pigeonhole. Most were published in Texas, but one, Luke and the Van Zandt County War, won the annual award for the best juvenile from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Then I decided to write for adults, and my first attempt, Mattie, was published by Doubleday in their Double D Western series which I truthfully think was sold to a subscriber list of mostly prisons and maybe some libraries. But it won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and today it does nicely on Amazon these days. I published another Double D and then moved (up?) to Bantam, where I published longer historical fiction—lives of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Jessie Benton Frémont, Lucille Mulhall (under the name Cherokee Rose), and later Etta Place—from another publisher.

The western market, at least the one I’d written for, seemed to either wither or pull away from me. I’d all along written a bit of non-fiction for young-adults—companies that published for school libraries--and in the early 21^st  century, that was all I did. But I itched to write novels, so I eventually turned to mysteries.

 

But that’s another story for another day.

Note the contorting covers for Libbie--above is the Bantam version, which shows Libbie looking like a 19th-century version of Madonna, standing in a Kansas field of lush grass fenced with barbed wire--never mind that barbed wire had barely been introduced by the time General Custer died and there was no way that Kansas was fenced. Behind her is the ubiquitous West of Arizona's red, dry land--but with a stockade fort. Libbie made the point in her writing--and so did I--that she was surprised that forts had no walls, fences, etc. Of course, the West had no sturdy logs as shown in the illustration--those might have been found a century earlier back east when the "dangerous" Native Americans were the Mohawks or Mohicans. Below is a more historically accurate cover.