The cover for my recently released collection of short fiction, Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories, evolved over a period of two years while I edited and fine-tuned the content. In the end, I changed the title of the lead story to accommodate the final cover art.

Initially, I tried to come up with a title for the collection, but this proved to be a daunting task as the stories are not related in any way. The generic titles I came up with sounded trite or had already been used. I gave up.

Many of the short story collections I found used the name of a story for the title of the collection. The title of my lead story, Plans, seemed to be a logical choice. A red sports car played a prominent role in the story, so I came up with this cover.

Although I liked the look of the cover, I thought it might mislead the potential reader into thinking that automobiles were the subject of the stories in the collection. In addition, the title story involved a sports car that had broken down on a desert highway. The car in the cover illustration looked as if it were parked in a showroom. I moved on.

I searched through thousands of photos and fell in love with one of an old motel sign. It fit the plot of the title story in which the main character makes plans to hook up with a woman he has stopped to help along the side of a highway. Here is the original cover using that photo.

This cover seemed to me to project an adventurous nostalgia that I thought would be appealing. This one was a winner. Then I did a search for book titles on Amazon using the word plans. Hundreds of books have the word plans in the title. Most of them are non-fiction titles about planning woodworking projects and such. In response to the search results, I changed the title of the lead story and the collection to Making Plans. The revised cover looked like this.

Somewhere I had heard of a free critique of artwork offered by a design website. I submitted my revised book cover—thumbs down all around. The critiques did not find one redeeming feature. I might as well have submitted blank artwork. Back to the drawing board.

In the story Making Plans, the main character talks about a local bar named Ed’s. I discovered a photo of two beers on a wooden table that I liked.

Friends who previewed this cover thought it looked like a beer advertisement. I inserted car keys for added effect.

The beer cover just didn’t generate any excitement. I scrapped it and shifted my attention to the setting of the lead story, a desolate, desert highway in West Texas. I found a great representative photo, added an illustration of a mile marker sign, and changed the name of the lead story and book to Mile Marker 135. The cover looked like this.

My search on Amazon produced dozens of books with Mile Marker in the title. That wouldn’t do. I changed the name of the lead story and book to Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas following an Amazon search that proved this to be a unique title. It described the location of the final art for the cover: a photo of a desolate, desert highway. I experimented with different fonts for the title and settled on the Snickles font. I had found my cover at last.

Cover image for Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories