Inside the Cover Design Process

Good People Cover Reveal & Pre-order Info

I started writing my debut novel in January 2015. After eleven years of writing, revising, and searching for a publisher that would give this book a chance, I can finally say that Good People will be published by Simon & Schuster on April 27, 2027. With this announcement comes two wonderful things that I’m so excited to share with you all—the cover reveal and pre-order links.

Good People’s Cover Reveal

Good People is now available for pre-order. Pre-order your copy today!

About Good People

For readers of Swift River and The Vanishing Half, a sharp, provocative debut novel about race, identity, ambition, and the dangerous stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Abandoned in a high chair as a baby with a Black family who adopted and raised her, Jo Tope, a white woman, grows up convinced that she is destined for a different life—one defined by elite schools, prestigious institutions, and the promise of belonging among the white world she believes was meant to be hers.

Now a hard-drinking student at Johns Hopkins University, Jo is singularly focused on winning a Rhodes Scholarship and escaping to Oxford. She is certain that achievement, status, and proximity to power will finally make her whole. But as her drinking worsens and the carefully constructed narrative of her life begins to unravel, Jo is forced to confront the question she has spent years avoiding: what does it actually mean to be a good person—and who gets to decide?

Darkly funny, intellectually daring, and unflinchingly honest, Good People is a bold debut that examines race, class, identity, family, and the limits of self-invention. Through the unforgettable voice of a deeply flawed protagonist, Kat Lewis delivers a bold, striking debut that challenges how we define belonging, and whether goodness is something we inherit, perform, or earn.

This gorgeous cover was designed by Madelyn Rodriguez, and the official cover reveal is up at Debutiful. Debutiful also has a high-level Q&A about how our team created this cover. Here’s a quick excerpt from the interview:

How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?

Good People follows the story of Jo Tope, a white girl who was raised by a Black family and must come to terms with her identity as she applies for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.

The novel is ultimately a satire about race, class, and elite academia. While writing this book, I drew on my experience as a Black woman who grew up in a predominantly white community in rural North Carolina. Growing up, I had to learn how to navigate spaces in which my community often saw me as “other.” When your community views you as “other,” you often have to navigate microaggressions like people touching your hair without asking or demanding to know where you are “really from.” Along with this, you often have to become hypervigilant about self-advocacy and proving your “worth” within the community. “You have to work twice as hard for half of what the majority has.” This is a phrase that many marginalized people have heard at some point in their lives.

With these experiences informing the book, our team wanted to create a cover that gives a nod to the challenge of “otherness” while representing a connection between Jo’s two cultural identities.

Read the full interview on Debutiful’s website.

Today, we’re doing a deep dive into what I did as the author to help our team at S&S design the cover.

Inside the Cover Design Process

In February, my editor sent me a cover memo document and asked me to answer the following questions:

1. What is the one-line pitch and full synopsis for the book?

2. What should the cover communicate?

3. Who is the audience/ideal reader?

4. What do you like and dislike about covers in general? What do you specifically hope Good People’s cover might have?

5. What existing covers already appeal to your intended audience?

6. What are some of your favorite covers in general?

7. What are some of your favorite visuals in general?

Today, we’ll break down my responses to each section, and I’ll share some resources that might be helpful to writers at various stages of the writing and publishing process.

1. One-line Pitch and Full Synopsis

One-line Pitch: Good People is about a white girl raised by a Black family who must come to terms with her identity as she applies for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.

Full Synopsis

Jo Tope’s birth mother left her in a high chair in the neighbor’s house and never came back. This is how the Topes, a Black family of four, adopted a white baby.

Good People follows Jo Tope, a habitually drunk college student who desperately wants to become white. Growing up with her identity split between the Black family that raised her and the white schools she attended, Jo always thought that college would be her chance to escape her past and fully embrace whiteness. Now, a junior at Johns Hopkins University, she pursues a Rhodes Scholarship, believing that a graduate degree from Oxford is her path to becoming a “regular white person.” But when her alcoholic tendencies threaten her personal relationships and her chances at the Rhodes, Jo must learn that whiteness will not save her before she loses her academic future and the people who matter most.

Blending the social commentary of Raven Leilani’s Luster and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black with the humor of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett, Good People is a biting story about coming of age within the context of race, love, and identity.

Over the years, I’ve written a lot of posts about pitching best practices. If you’re looking for a guide to writing pitches for your book, check out our “How to Write a Query Letter” post.

2. What should the cover communicate?

This prompt came with three follow-up questions:

1. What is the tone (e.g. serious vs. fun)?

2. How should the cover make potential readers feel?

3. Is the book literary or commercial?

Here’s my response:

Good People is a comic novel and a satire about race, class, and elite academia. The cover should communicate a fun, comedic reading experience with a slight literary bend.

3. Who is the audience/ideal reader?

This prompt included this follow-up question: what else does this buyer read, watch, listen to, etc.?

Good People’s ideal reader is a millennial Black woman who is chronically online, watched Game of Thrones, and went through an anime phase. Though the novel is literary fiction, its unhinged protagonist will appeal to Black women who watched WandaVision and said, “Good for her” like Lucille Bluth. In addition to this ideal reader, Good People will also resonate with people of color who navigate predominantly white spaces and anyone else who feels “othered” in their own community.

Beyond these particular demographics, this book is for nerdy readers and comedy enthusiasts who have Dropout TV subscriptions, listen to Dungeons and Dragons podcasts, and love movies and TV shows like Poker Face, Thor Ragnarok, American Fiction, and Star Trek: Lower Decks.

This response came almost verbatim from my application to Poets & Writers’ Get the Word Out Publicity Incubator. Since I started writing professionally in 2012, I’ve applied to countless fellowships, residencies, and summer writing workshops. Poets & Writers’ GTWO application was hands down the most difficult written application I’ve ever done because the questions asked me to think deeply (and concisely!) about Good People as a product in a way that I hadn’t before. Regardless of whether you are writing, revising, or about to publish your book, I highly recommend taking a stab at the three questions below to get clarity on what your book offers to readers and how you might actually reach those readers. The word count limits listed below make this exercise especially difficult, but you will have a deeper, multi-faceted understanding of your book afterwards.

Marketing & Publicity Questions

1. Please provide a brief description of your book (250 words).

2. Please describe your book’s broader potential impact—artistic, social, political, etc.— and what methods you plan to utilize to realize this goal (150 words).

3. Please describe the specific readers and communities you hope your book reaches, and how you hope to reach them (150 words).

4. Cover Likes, Dislikes, and Desires

Likes: Bright neon colors, bold typography, fine art covers (e.g. MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION), people if drawn with faces partially obscured (see examples below)

Dislikes: Pinks, purples, any traditionally “feminine” colors, eyes/full faces

Desires: Bold color palette, something that pops as a small thumbnail on the internet, humorous image that makes people talk about the cover (see examples below)

5. Existing Covers Already Appealing to Intended Audience

6. Favorite Covers in General

7. Favorite Visual References

The Memeboard

Painting Suggestion

The Cover’s First Draft

Madelyn Rodriguez and the rest of the team hit it out of the park with the first version they sent me. In April, two months after I shared my responses above, my editor called me, saying that he received the cover and wanted to hear my reaction live. While we were on the phone, he emailed the cover to me, and the six seconds I waited for it to pop up in my inbox were the longest six seconds of my life. I instantly fell in love with the cover. The only things that changed between that phone call and the final reveal was the font for my name and the nail polish color on the hand.

As I mentioned earlier, I started writing Good People in 2015. By the time the book hits the shelves next year, I will have spent twelve years working to bring these characters into the world. For over a decade, Good People has been nothing but a very long Word Document on my computer. Seeing Jo’s hair on the cover made the novel truly feel like a “real” book for the first time.

Pre-order Good People today!

Pre-order Good People

The number of pre-orders Good People receives greatly impacts the marketing support my publisher will provide. If any of my posts have been helpful to you and your writing life, please consider pre-ordering Good People to support my work as a writer and educator.

Until next time,

Kat