'A Cover That People Might Love to Hate'
Q&A with Catherine Weiss, Cover Designer and Author of 'Big Money Porno Mommy'
Last year, I published a newsletter about “ugly” yet well-designed book covers called Cover Your Book with Beautiful Garbage.
I have seen a cover that makes the ones in that newsletter look positively cute. As far as I am concerned, this cover is the pinnacle of this genre of design.
I’m talking about Big Money Porno Mommy by Catherine Weiss.
I was going to write a follow-up post to “Beautiful Garbage,” heavily featuring Big Money Porno Mommy and the Q&A Weiss did with Print announcing the cover. I will still write that follow-up—I found some more good “ugly” covers for you—but thanks to the magic of
, I recently got the opportunity to ask Weiss some of my own questions. I didn’t want to make them repeat themselves, so I used their answers in Print as a jumping off point for mine. Below, you’ll read my original introduction featuring the remarks from the Print interview followed by my own Q&A with the author.‘Catherine Weiss Embraces Discomfort’
Why would an author let this image cover their book?
They designed it themselves.
“I needed the flesh to be forefront,” Weiss writes about their cover. “Big Money Porno Mommy is about power and desire. It’s about pornography and my choice to not become a mother. It’s about the male gaze and how it’s wielded. It’s about all of these things in the context of my body, which happens to be a fat body.”
I was also interested in having the typography contain this fleshiness, so you get the information from what the words literally say, but I also wanted the typography to give information as well. Having the title literally embodied in flesh was one way to do that. Then layering the little details of specificity onto the letters, like, Is there a belly button? Is that a tuft of hair? Things that would both hopefully draw someone in to look, and also be a little bit like, Ooh, do I want to look at this? To have that push and pull.
Ooh, do I want to look at this? I don’t know, but I can’t look away. I think this cover is incredible. Did you see the pimple? It’s audacious, but not for the sake of audacity. It is rooted in conceptually sound reasoning—which, to me, is at the heart of successful book cover design.
Click here to read the Q&A in Print
This cover—and this book—will not be everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s not trying to be. This is the beauty of small, independent publishing. Penguin’s marketing team would never. Maybe you hate it. This is part of what makes it incredible to me. If books can be challenging, their book covers can be too.
So how’d they create it?
This [cover] is created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Illustrator has a very simple tool that allows you to blow up text or other shapes to inflate them in this faux 3D space. Once I realized that tool was pretty simple and I could play with it by adding skin texture, I spent a lot of time finding the right skin texture to make it look as gross as possible.
I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the shape of the letters was going to be, because I wanted it to be legible. The first iteration was much more blocky and the letters were separated from each other, so it looked a little bit more like someone had been chopped up. That wasn’t quite right and that was also much harder to read.
I didn’t really spend much time sketching but iterating in the software. How far can I distort this letter pattern to make it legible and also to get the effect that I’m looking for?
Because they also authored the book, Weiss got to spend a lot of time with this cover. They started brainstorming cover ideas once they had the book’s title and about half of the poems in the collection. If only we all had that kind of time on our covers!
“An early iteration looked more like Sharpie on my stomach,” said Weiss, “and I thought about having a photograph instead of doing it digitally. But at a certain point I realized I needed to learn the software to make my vision happen.”
Sometimes I think that if I ever write a book, I wouldn’t want to design its cover, maybe especially if the book was this personal. But Weiss rose to the challenge. When asked what they were most proud of, they said, “letting myself sit with the uncomfortable. Even with the cover, being able to forefront the discomfort while not giving up the joy that is found in this collection.”
'A Cover That People Might Love to Hate'
NR: Was there ever any consideration that anyone else might design this cover? I go back and forth on whether or not I would want to design a cover for my own, hypothetical, future book.
CW: Every time I start writing a new collection I say, “this is it! I won’t do my own cover this time!” I think it would be interesting—almost luxurious—to collaborate with a cover artist, but I keep having ideas I want to try. For Big Money Porno Mommy, it was really important the cover deal with fatness in some way, and also have some kind of humor or levity. Tonally, I wanted to get that right.
What did the feedback and approval process look like with Game Over Books? I can’t imagine this cover being approved by a Big 5 publisher—in a good way!
When I first showed Josh, the EIC at Game Over Books, this cover concept (which was a rendering of the fleshy text and blemish details with a different background) his initial response was literally “ugh lol” but he didn’t shut it down. We went back and forth a few times with tweaks to make sure the title was legible, and collectively tried some different backgrounds to see what popped best as a thumbnail, but otherwise he trusted me with the vision.
Just about all humans have belly buttons and toenails and pimples, but rarely do these appear on a book cover. It’s making the invisible visible and people can have a strong reaction to the unexpected, especially when it might be revealing something they are not used to displaying themselves.
The epigraph to your book reads: “I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards.” How do you feel about the role of subtext on a book cover?
The humor for me in the epigraph is that good poetry is usually filled to the brim with subtext, but there is this tension that happens when you use this highbrow form and write about lowbrow topics, or address things that usually aren’t discussed in polite company, like phone sex, or pornography, or even why a woman doesn’t have children. By blazing past subtext and into text, the invisible becomes inescapably visible. Just about all humans have belly buttons and toenails and pimples, but rarely do these appear on a book cover. It’s making the invisible visible and people can have a strong reaction to the unexpected, especially when it might be revealing something they are not used to displaying themselves.
Book covers are, generally speaking, at the intersection of art and commerce. They need to interpret, but also sell. Did you think much about sales while designing this cover? Did anyone at the publisher give notes about sales?
As someone who doesn’t have formal training in book covers or design in general, I normally iterate until I stumble across a version I can picture holding its own on a bookshelf display. There are a lot of great books out there, and I’m hoping that the novelty of my cover and title will get some folks to pick up the book or read the back copy—then the poems themselves have to do their work to make the sale, probably. The press has some benchmarks about thumbnail readability that I needed to hit, but otherwise I had a lot of freedom to get weird with the cover.
The title of your collection is as evocative as the design. Were there other contenders for the book’s title, and if so, what do you think those covers might have looked like?
This collection never had another title contender. Very early in the process of assembling the poems for this manuscript, I was having a conversation with my husband Niko, and I was trying to explain the interlocking combination of themes about different kinds of power. He jokingly called it Big Money Porno Mommy and I was like, no that’s it, that’s the title.
What came first for you, poetry or design? How do these two inform each other as part of a larger creative practice?
I started with poetry, but barely. Other than the bad rhyming poetry I attempted and set aside in high school, I really began as a poet when I started attending open mics in 2013. One of the lovely things about open mic communities is there are many opportunities to sell or trade self-produced chapbooks. I learned a little bit about layout and cover design by trial and error, printing at home or bringing the file to the local copy shop. I really loved the process of making chapbooks, so I started helping my friends make them too—which often meant I was tasked with designing their covers. I get that covers are a sales tool, but when you hit upon a harmonizing cover concept, it’s like putting a title on a poem. A good cover, like a good title, creates additional meaning, and it opens the door to the work as a whole.
You’ve designed covers for other poetry collections besides this one. I’m not a poet, but I do think poetry covers are really fun to design. What do you like about doing these covers?
It seems like there are fewer conventions for poetry collection covers because there’s so little money in the genre, small presses are allowing themselves to experiment more freely. (Or maybe I just am blissfully unaware of the norms—that’s possible too!)
In your book you write “my whole life i misunderstood / the importance of play.” You weren’t writing about cover design here, but I am the kind of guy who reads a poem about phone sex and thinks about book covers. How important was “play” in the development of this cover? In your other design work in general?
Play is so important. I love the process of reading a poetry collection and brainstorming several directions a cover could go. Does this one call for a typography design or an illustration? What combinations of software tools can I use? I feel like I’m still learning so every cover is an opportunity to figure out something about design I didn’t know before, which feels joyful and relevant to play. But I think I especially enjoyed making this cover because it was my own book, and I could take the risk to create a cover that people might love to hate.
Big Money Porno Mommy publishes in March 2025 from Game Over Books.
Preorder the book here.
📓 Nathaniel’s Notebook 📓
News: David Lynch has died. RIP to an incredible artist.
News: One of my clients emailed and told me they’re submitting a cover I designed to the Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show. It’s my first time! The cover in question:
Reading (books): The Memory Palace by Nate Dimeo, Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces by Gail Griffin
Reading (online): “Success” by
, “The Definitive, Entirely Subjective Ranking of Percival Everett’s Novels” by , “How not to f*ck up your newsletter” by and , “Fix Your Hearts or Die!: A Short Ode to David Lynch (RIP)” byWriting: I just finished a piece that is equal parts personal essay and book design history. I’m really excited about it and I hope you like it. It’s tentatively called “What Your Favorite Book Cover Says About You.”
Working: I’m back to work at the library, and I eased myself back in with some promo graphics. Here’s a pair that I like, advertising the return of the one and only Aaron Draplin for a workshop and a lecture .
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for reading! And thank you to Catherine Weiss for taking the time to answer my questions. To risk being totally uncool for a moment, I never imagined a publicist might email me asking if I wanted to interview an author. What a thrill!
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I loved that cover from the git-go. I could deconstruct why, but I’m not going to. But it spoke right away.
Weiss is awesome! I love how they conceptualized this cover. Thanks for this great deep dive and interview.