About The Cover

Literary agents and editors at the big publishing houses hate it when authors have opinions about their book covers. Even at the self-publishing level the how-to books all shout, "Don't throw your money away! Get a professional cover!"

Now I can't draw a straight line with a ruler, but after doing all those posters and working successfully with a wide range of visual artists, why not? I had the concept about 1995, and have long seen the outline of it in my mind's eye. But I needed a lot of help to translate the mental image into visual reality.

As the novel evolved my friend John Garvey, a gifted illustrator finishing his PhD in Chemistry at New Mexico, helped with sketches of Rushmore, a rainbow, the plants, and a pot-o'-gold which I scanned and pieced together, sizing and resizing into a rough layout. Whenever John was in town, he would stop in and we'd shoot the bull while working on it over a six-pack. (I've always been jealous of the painters and illustrators I've worked with for their ability to hang out while they're creating. No way a writer can socialize when he's working.)

We planned another session to get Nixon just right, but a few months later John died of a seizure. When the novel was at long last coming to a finish I took what we had done to a friend and illustrator with whom I'd worked on other projects, Kelli Bullock. She integrated John's Rushmore sketches, fixed Nixon, and drew the pot-o'-gold and some plants. When she finished I scanned her illustrations and my wife, who had been bitten by the Photoshop bug and recently taken several classes, made me a rainbow. I searched the web from time to time for anything that would graphically convey the agricultural and historical aspects, and one day I Googled up a postcard, "Hemp Field in Old Kentucky," which the site said carried a postmark of 1923. It had already been sold (for $5), but I was able to grab the image and work with it in the layout. Finally, my wife redrew the plants to better fit the new background. There will be a few more tweaks before we finally go to press.