My Stories Have No Endings by Gayle Gonsalves

Today I’m sharing the cover of successful self-published author Gayle Gonsalves’ new novel, My Stories Have No Endings. I work on several book projects at a time, so unfortunately I can’t read all of them.  But the lyrical prose in Gayle’s book sucked me in right away. Her book tells the story of an aspiring writer named Kai growing up on a Caribbean island, falling in love and learning her family’s secrets.

Gayle requested a bright, energetic, cover that captured the vibrant island setting of the novel. I shared a quilt by artist Paolo Arao that I thought might fit the theme she was looking for, and we used this as our color palette.

I shared several pencil drawings with Gayle, all centered around her vision of a girl standing on a hill, starting out over the sea. I added in a tamarind tree to the left side of the cover in order to balance out where the title would land in the composition.

Later, I used a small piece of the tamarind tree as a heading for each chapter:

Once we selected the final cover design, I transferred the drawing to a block of linoleum and carved it out. I then inked it up, printed it, and traced the drawing in Adobe Illustrator. I then used Illustrator and Photoshop to add sections of color and texture to the cover art. 

Printing the cover image of self-published author Gayle Gonsalves’ award winning novel, My Stories Have No Endings.

Here is the final cover! I’m proud of how closely Gayle and I worked to achieve a cover that embodied her bold vision and complemented her fabulous writing. Check out My Stories Have No Endings on Amazon!  

Update! Gayle’s book has won not one, but three awards since the writing of this original post. My Stories Have No Endings is a finalist for both a National Indie Excellence award, won second place in the Women’s Fiction category of the Colorado Independent Publishing Association Evvy awards, and was a distinguished favorite in the NYC Big Book Awards. Congrats Gayle!