CONVERSATION: Behind the Cover with Drew Buxton and Kate McMullen

How a book gets made at Hub City Press

At Zona Motel we don’t do Cover Reveals. We don’t believe in them. We see Cover Reveals as part of corporate publishing’s attempt to turn books into soulless market commodities. Cover Reveals have really ramped up since the mid-2010s and are part of a trend that has robbed us of in-depth book reviews and real discourse, a trend that focuses on everything besides the carefully crafted words inside the cover.

So, when Kate McMullen reached out to me (Mesha Maren) to ask if we would do a Cover Reveal for Daytona Teddy Riggs, my answer was no. But the cover was really cool, and I was genuinely curious about how it was made, how Kate found Buxton’s novel, and, basically, how the whole process of publishing works at Hub City. I proposed that we have a different kind of reveal, and I am very glad that I did. I see this conversation between Kate McMullen (Associate Publisher of Hub City Press) and Drew Buxton (author of the forthcoming Daytona Teddy Riggs) as an extension of other conversations that have occurred over the past few weeks here at Zona Motel, conversations about editing and book production that have come up through Chris Stuck’s “Chasing Wild Geese Through the Corporate Book World” and my piece on Hachette’s Internal Use of AI.

Kate McMullen: At Hub City Press, we work very directly with our authors for covers. Our timeline for book production, from acquisition to bookshelf, is usually around 14-18 months, depending on our schedule, and cover design comes after editorial is finished and jacket copy and other parts of the marketing package are coming together, in the first few months of our relationship with the writer. Drew Buxton’s novel Daytona Teddy Riggs hits shelves this August. He first submitted the novel to our open call back in October of 2024. He and I chatted about some ways the book might improve before I saw it again in March 2025, and by then, I knew I had to publish this novel.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book so committed to the bit. Set in the mid-90s, we follow Teddy through a pretty weird time in his life. He is estranged from his oil magnate family, lives with his grandma in Corpus Christi, and in a few weeks, Teddy is going to Houston for the strong man invitationals and to see his favorite self-help guru, Pat Dupree, give a conference the same week. He feels like this is a sign that his life is finally on the right track. Inevitably, things start to go wrong pretty much immediately. Reading this book sometimes feels like talking to that guy on Twitter you wish would stop commenting on your posts, but also like saying hey to the nice neighbor kid who never quite got his life started. Teddy is both of these guys: a hopeless romantic and an utter menace.

After another round of edits with our remote editor, the phenomenal Katherine Webb-Hehn, out in Birmingham, we started talking about the cover itself in December. Drew had sent a brief mood board of covers he liked and didn’t like, and usually, what unfolds from there is a bit more back and forth between the author and me about some themes, images, and vibes we want to see come from the cover, tossing some more specific ideas for direction around. But I had recently discovered the illustrator Nada Hayek on Instagram (I think through a cover reveal for Priya Gun’s Your Driver is Waiting), and right away I was pretty dead set on hiring her for Daytona Teddy Riggs. So I emailed Drew—subject line: “A cover artist to run by you”—and, in retrospect, came pretty hard out of the gate, convincing him that this was the move for the cover.

Nada Hayek says of her experience working on Daytona Teddy Riggs, “Juxtaposition is something I like to explore in my personal illustrations, so working with themes of masculinity and vulnerability for Daytona Teddy Riggs felt natural to me and meant I could approach the cover concepts intuitively. I was especially happy to hear the author's note that "slightly campy works with the book." Exaggeration just seems like the way to go when mid-90s bodybuilder/strongman imagery is at play. My first step with any project is creating a moodboard, and this one was probably the most buff, shirtless, and '90s pickup-filled reference image collection I've ever put together. Since I had already gotten some cover direction involving the protagonist carrying something big, I thought, why not push it even further and have him holding up an unrealistic stack of heavy objects? It checked all the boxes in my head - it felt a little playful, spoke to Daytona's obsession with winning the World's Strongest Man competition, and worked as a metaphor for his struggles.”

Before we jump into the specifics about the cover, can I ask you, Drew, about your experience editing your novel? You went through two different rounds of edits with us, a pre-contract revise and resubmit, and then another round for continuity and other nitty-gritty things with Katherine. I’d love to hear from your perspective on how the book changed over that time and what the process felt like for you.

Drew Buxton: I wrote the first draft pretty quickly and didn’t really have anyone look at it before I sent it out. In retrospect, I was too deep into it to notice some of the things that weren’t working. Your initial feedback totally unlocked the final third for me. I could tell you “got” the Teddy character. I think it was the perfect nudge. We both agreed that the final beat was right, but you knew Teddy’s internal arc needed to be right for it to really pay off. I’m thrilled with how it turned out!

After acceptance, Katherine gently pointed out some continuity issues. It’s a novel that rambles along, and it got lost a few times, haha. I was honestly a little embarrassed. I ended up making a document tracking every day–what Teddy ate, what he watched on TV, etc. It was interesting looking over TV schedules from 1996. I was nine then, so it’s pretty hazy. It brought me back to watching Unsolved Mysteries every Friday night, stuff like that. Tying up all the loose ends was definitely a tedious process, but Katherine made it so much smoother.

The biggest thing was I could tell y’all were genuinely invested in the novel being as good as it could possibly be.

KM: This isn’t your first rodeo with covers, since this is your second book. I’m curious how it went for the first book, So Much Heart, which also has a really fantastic cover, in a kind of similar cartoon-y vibe.

DB: For my first book, with the title being So Much Heart, it was important to use the cover to show people the book wasn’t lame or boring. I’m a big fan of movie posters, and I look at them as stand-alone pieces of art. I have some great ones like Escape From New York hanging up at my house. I really like a lot of old exploitation film posters where you’re almost overwhelmed by the variety of images thrown at you. The cover of Action Bronson’s album Rare Chandeliers is a great take on this style, and I told Jon Nix at With An X Books that I wanted something like that. He brought in the great Huff Stuff to do it, and he blew us away.

KM: When I saw the cover for your first book, when I was first considering Daytona Teddy Riggs, I was like, yeah, this guy gets it!

Talk to me about opening the cover email we sent for the first time. I feel like we went into the design process on the same page, but how did that feel flipping through Nada’s concept art?

DB: When you first emailed me saying you think you’d found the perfect artist, I was a little nervous. We hadn’t really talked about the cover yet. I think at that point, I’d just sent y’all a few examples of covers I liked. Then I looked at Nada’s work, and all my anxiety went away. I got so excited. It was a better version of the dream artist I had in my head. I’m not very schooled on visual art and find it difficult to describe different styles, but luckily, we were perfectly synced up! The hard part was choosing between the different options she gave us, but it was a great problem to have.

What about Nada’s style struck you as the right fit for the Teddy character?

KM: Ha, I definitely got a little excited. Usually, we work off the mood board we have all our authors send over (stuff you like, stuff you hate, and stuff that is comparable to your book), and then I’ll send over some artists if we’re hiring out for art. In the case of Daytona Teddy Riggs, I wanted the package to be really in your face with color and design, so I knew I was hiring an illustrator or a cover designer outside the shop. I think it was actually Meg who sent one of Nada’s covers over, and then she popped up again in some digging Julie did, so there was, behind the scenes, a kind of immediate consensus that her styling could be the perfect fit. Her eye for color and texture just lined up right away with what I envisioned for Teddy, a sort of cereal box hero wonderland that would make you pick the book up if you saw it on a shelf.

Was there one thing you really didn’t want to see on the cover? Something that if we’d come back, you would have thought, oh no, how do I fix this immediately?

DB: This is vague, but my first thought was that I just hope the cover isn’t bad. God, there are so many bad covers out there. Writers put so much effort into writing a great book, and then it gets stuck with a bad cover. Terrible. I really prefer stark images to the abstract look, but I guess it depends on the tone of the book. An abstract cover for this novel would make no sense. In thinking more about it now, I guess tone is one of the biggest things you want to convey with a cover. Do you agree?

KM: One thousand percent. We keep talking about the browsing in a bookstore aspect of cover design. We run a bookshop up the street, and I can’t tell you how helpful it is to walk up there when I need ideas. When you’re browsing around tables of just uncategorized “new fiction”, especially at our shop, where we have both heavy genre readers and customers with less commercial taste, you know exactly what you’re looking for based on the tone the cover conveys, right? Like, does this have sprayed edges and lots of sparkly foil? If you’re looking for a quiet literary novel, you won’t even pick those books up.

DW: I think most writers have an idea of a “perfect” cover to fit their book, mostly thinking about it from an artistic standpoint, like what would perfectly represent the story. As the publisher, I imagine you also have to think about designing something someone would pick up at a bookstore.

How do you balance art with marketability when it comes to cover design?

KM: Great question, and I’m so bad at answering this! For Teddy, I feel like everything sort of solidified very quickly, and I had no worries about marketability because of how grabby the artwork was, how central the story was to the work from the start, and the reactions it was getting around the office (and with my husband, who rates all our covers). It helped a lot that Nada has illustrated a few book covers already—I find graphic designers understand the market just as well, if not more than I do sometimes. They also aren’t constrained by the same cover trends that book designers are seeing all the time.

To actually answer this question: what I end up thinking about most is those comparison title covers we have our authors send, and the ones we generate in the office. We want to be thinking both about representing the work inside and the hopes and dreams an author has for their book-child, while balancing what’s been done, not done, or overdone in the space where the book slots into the market. Plus lots of stuff about the image and text size working at size online. And after all this work, most books are spine out on a shelf in a store, not face out, so that’s always an interesting calculus, too.

I’m curious, do you have advice for writers embarking on their first round of cover design now that you’ve done this twice?

DB: I think I’ve mostly just gotten lucky, but I’d say try to go with a press with covers you like or that allow author input. Bring it up before you commit. With both of my books, what the artist came up with was better than what I’d pictured in my head. I think it’s best to find someone with a style you like, give them a general idea of what you’re thinking, then let them do their thing from there. There can always be adjustments later.